# Unknown language: κλου σαρα ταυαι πεκαι ιυιαις μεγεραις κομιλαι



## mattheo

Could someone help me identifying this language? I came across it when browsing through photographic documentation of some archeological excavation conducted in 1993 in Turkey by students of Wrocław University. Among others there is some pottery and tablets with inscriptions in Greek - nothing special. The problem is that a few of those inscriptions are written with Greek letters but the language definitely isn't Greek (it actually "sounds" a bit similar but the text makes no sense). I'm no expert in Antiquity so maybe it's something obvious. 

The longest text that I found:

κλου σαρα ταυαι πεκαι ιυιαις μεγεραις κομιλαι εσαν ταυοι γοχχι δουις νεβνεβοις ταυα λουβα εκνουι μερις ιπ ταβ ες κκιγις

Of course I can't guarantee that I transcribed this correctly, though the writing is quite clear. The other strange thing is that the words are separated by dots, while the inscriptions in Greek usually have no separation between words. Also, no accents are marked. At first I assumed that it is in Greek but consists of words that I don't know, but my dictionary doesn't list any of them.

There's also a photo of some kind of staff (???) with:

δουκιτρας (in the middle)
ας δεδε μεμ (on the opposite side; also with dots)

I'd appreciate any help.


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## shawnee

I doubt very much that moving this to the Greek forum is going to yield any results. As it stands, the language is unrecognizable from a Greek point of view, to me at least. Some pictures of the source might be helpful.


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## Au101

What interests me about this is the gemination and doubling of syllables. Normally, this would just be a feature that would be worth highlighting - in the hope of recognising the language. Examples of doubling would be *νεβνεβ*οις and *δεδε*. As I say this isn't especially remarkable - just an interesting feature of many languages - however, what struck me is *κκ*ιγις. Now I'm not aware that this digraph has ever had any special phonological value, so I'm going to take it as read and assume that it's a double /k/, which is a curious thing to find at the start of a word, in my rather humble opinion. I don't have much experience in phonetics, but I wonder how one would differentiate between *κ*ομιλαι and *κκ*ιγις. Perhaps the /k/ in *κκ*ιγις is aspirated, but then what is the χ for? Perhaps this point isn't actually of much interest - I'm certainly not an expert and perhaps those with more knowledge of languages - especially ancient ones - will find this thoroughly unremarkable, however I found it noteworthy.

The first thing that I thought of was that it could be an - albeit poor - transliteration of Egyptian, it just seemed to remind me of that somehow - but that really is a stab in the dark. I agree with Shawnee, though, some pictures might provide some useful context.


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## DenisBiH

> The other strange thing is that the words are separated by dots, while the inscriptions in Greek usually have no separation between words. Also, no accents are marked.




Interesting. I'm no expert but a quick search shows this, for example:



> The language is known from a few fairly extensive inscriptions. From them scholars have identified at least two dialects. One is considered standard Lycian, also termed Lycian A; the other, which is attested on side D of the Xanthos stele, is termed Lycian B or Milyan, separated by its grammatical particularities. Lycian had its own alphabet, which was *closely related to the Greek alphabet* but included at least one character borrowed from Carian, as well characters proper to the language. *The words were often, but not always, separated by two points*.


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## artion

Could be Phrygian or any related language of Asia Minor. Some words look like Greek (εσαν, μεγεραις, μερις). Is it in capital letters? Dots were used in Greek too. Can we have a picture?


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## Scholiast

Greetings (χαῖρετε)

Another couple of questions: how confident can you be that in the inscription the words are divided as they are in your transcription? Secondly, what, if any, contextual evidence ("Fundort", the place and surrounding remains) is available to suggest a cultural or chronological (and thereby linguistic) context?


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## apmoy70

This reminds me of Gnostic passwords. Gnostic groups wrote down passages (as the Nag Hammadi library demonstrates), sometimes going on for whole paragraphs or pages, of completely non-sensical syllables or phrases and they were the passwords the Gnostics had to memorize in order to make it pass the "Gatekeepers", the guardians of the Gates that controlled the ascension of the human soul from earth to heaven after death.


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