Carian alphabets

The Carian alphabets are a number of regional scripts used to write the Carian language of western Anatolia. They consisted of some 30 alphabetic letters, with several geographic variants in Caria and a homogeneous variant attested from the Nile delta, where Carian mercenaries fought for the Egyptian pharaohs. They were written left-to-right in Caria (apart from the Carian–Lydian city of Tralleis) and right-to-left in Egypt. Carian was deciphered primarily through Egyptian–Carian bilingual tomb inscriptions, starting with John Ray in 1981; previously only a few sound values and the alphabetic nature of the script had been demonstrated. The readings of Ray and subsequent scholars were largely confirmed with a Carian–Greek bilingual inscription discovered in Kaunos in 1996, which for the first time verified personal names, but the identification of many letters remains provisional and debated, and a few are wholly unknown.

Scripts

There is a range of graphic variation between cities in Caria, some of which extreme enough to have separate Unicode characters.^[1] The Kaunos alphabet is thought to be complete. There may be other letters in Egyptian cities outside Memphis, but they need to be confirmed. The letters with identified values in the various cities are as follows:^[2]

Origin

The Carian scripts, which have a common origin, have long puzzled scholars. Most of the letters resemble letters of the Greek alphabet, but their sound values are generally unrelated to the values of the Greek letters. This is unusual among the alphabets of Asia Minor, which generally approximate the Greek alphabet fairly well, both in sound and shape, apart from sounds which had no equivalent in Greek. However, the Carian sound values are not completely disconnected: 𐊠 /a/ (Greek Α), 𐊫 /o/ (Greek Ο), 𐊰 /s/ (Greek Ϻ san), and 𐊲 /u/ (Greek Υ) are as close to Greek as any Anatolian alphabet, and 𐊷, which resembles Greek Β, has the similar sound /p/, which it shares with Greek-derived Lydian 𐤡.

Adiego (2007) therefore suggests that the original Carian script was adopted from cursive Greek, and that it was later restructured, perhaps for monumental inscription, by imitating the form of the most graphically similar Greek print letters without considering their phonetic values. Thus a /t/, which in its cursive form may have had a curved top, was modeled after Greek qoppa (Ϙ) rather than its ancestral tau (Τ) to become 𐊭. Carian /m/, from archaic Greek 𐌌, would have been simplified and was therefore closer in shape to Greek Ν than Μ when it was remodeled as 𐊪. Indeed, many of the regional variants of Carian letters parallel Greek variants: 𐊥 𐅝 are common graphic variants of digamma, 𐊨 ʘ of theta, 𐊬 Λ of both gamma and lambda, 𐌓 𐊯 𐌃 of rho, 𐊵 𐊜 of phi, 𐊴 𐊛 of chi, 𐊲 V of upsilon, and 𐋏 𐊺 parallel Η 𐌇 eta. (See those articles.) This could also explain why one of the rarest letters, 𐊱, has the form of one of the most common Greek letters.^[13] However, no such proto-Carian cursive script is attested, so these etymologies are speculative.

Further developments occurred within each script; in Kaunos, for example, it would seem that 𐊮 /š/ and 𐊭 /t/ both came to resemble a Latin P, and so were distinguished with an extra line in one: 𐌓 /t/, 𐊯 /š/.

Decipherment

Numerous attempts at deciphering the Carian inscriptions were made during the 20th century. In the 1960s the Russian researcher Vitaly Shevoroshkin showed that earlier assumptions that the script was a syllabic or semisyllabic writing system was false. However, he failed to decipher the script because he took the values of letters resembling those of the Greek alphabet for granted.

The script was finally deciphered in the 1980s by Egyptologist John D. Ray, who used Carian–Egyptian bilingual inscriptions that had been neglected until then. The radically different values he assigned to the letters met with scepticism, but after refinements by Ignasi-Xavier Adiego and Diether Schürr in the early 1990s the readings gained acceptance. The discovery of a new bilingual inscription in 1996 confirmed the essential validity of their decipherment.

Unicode

Carian was added to the Unicode Standard in April, 2008 with the release of version 5.1. It is encoded in Plane 1 (Supplementary Multilingual Plane).

The Unicode block for Carian is U+102A0 ... U+102DF. Grey areas indicate non-assigned code points:

𐊡𐋊𐋋𐋌𐋍 are graphic variants, as are 𐊤𐋈𐋐, 𐋎𐊦𐋏, 𐊺𐋏, 𐊼𐊽, 𐋂𐋃, 𐋁𐋀, and possibly 𐋇𐊶.

References

• Adiego Lajara, I.J. The Carian Language. Leiden: Brill, 2006.
• H. Craig Melchert, "Carian", in Woodward ed. The Ancient Languages of Asia Minor, 2008.
• Davies, Anna Morpurgo, "Decipherment" in International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, William J. Frawley, ed., 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2003) I:421.
• Michael Everson, "Proposal to encode the Carian script in the SMP of the UCS", ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 N3020R, 2006-01-12. full text. Contains many useful illustrations and tables.
• Schürr, Diether, "Zur Bestimmung der Lautwerte des karischen Alphabets 1971-1991", Kadmos 31:127-156 (1992).
• Swiggers & Jenniges, in: P.T. Daniels & W. Bright (eds.), The World's Writing Systems (New York/Oxford, 1996), pp. 285–286.
• Vidal M.C. "European Alphabets, Ancient Classical", in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd ed., 2006.