28/10/2025
The Luwians: An Ancient Anatolian People
The Luwians were an ancient Indo-European people who occupied a large part of Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) during the Bronze and early Iron Ages. They spoke the Luwian language, which belongs to the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European family and is closely related to Hittite.
Historically, the Luwians were most widespread across the western and southern regions of Anatolia, including the area the Hittites knew as Arzawa. Their culture and religion had a profound influence on the Hittite Kingdom during the Late Bronze Age (c. 1600–1200 BCE), where Luwian likely served as a kind of lingua franca in the western parts of the empire.
Luwian is known from two main writing systems. The first is Cuneiform Luwian, found on clay tablets in the Hittite capital of Hattusa. The second, and later, is Hieroglyphic Luwian, which utilized its own unique script.
Following 1200 BCE, when the Hittite Empire collapsed, the Luwians did not disappear. On the contrary, they became the dominant cultural force in the so-called Neo-Hittite (or Syro-Hittite) kingdoms that emerged in southeastern Anatolia and northern Syria (such as Carchemish). In these states, Hieroglyphic Luwian was used for monumental inscriptions and survived until the 8th century BCE.
However, the Luwian language was only one of a group of closely related languages, collectively known as the Luwic branch. Other languages in this group, such as Lycian, Carian, Lydian, Sidetic, and Pisidian, continued to be spoken in western and southern Anatolia for many centuries thereafter. Pisidian inscriptions, for example, are attested as late as the 2nd century CE, with some hypotheses suggesting that related dialects like Isaurian may have persisted even longer. Thus, the Luwians were among the most important cultural inheritors of the Hittite Empire, but these later, localized dialects represent the last known remnants of the Anatolian language family to survive into the Common Era
Graphics by historia.maximum
