Re: Scythian

From: Patrick Ryan
Message: 54118
Date: 2008-02-25

Francesco,

I want to thank you for bringing this type of material to our attention.

I am glad someone among us is keeping up with developments like this.


Patrick


----- Original Message -----
From: "Francesco Brighenti" <frabrig@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, February 25, 2008 5:51 AM
Subject: [tied] Re: Scythian






--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...>
wrote:

> I found this incongruous --the idea that Hieroglyphic Hittite
> script was used to write Scythian.
> 1 --I thought the hieroglyphic script was Luwian
> 2 --How would the Hittite have come in contact with
> Scythians?
> 3 --What is the date for this?
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scythian_languages
> "Scythian Language" Wikipedia
>
> Inscriptions
> Some scholars ascribe certain inscribed objects found
> in the Carpathian Basin and in Central Asia to the
> Scythians, but the interpretation of these
> inscriptions remains disputed (given that nobody has
> definitively identified the alphabet or translated the
> content).
> An inscription from Saqqez written in the Hieroglyphic
> Hittite script may represent Scythian...
> Transcription:
> patinasana tapa. vasnam: 40 vasaka 30
> arzatam sikar. UTA harsta XSAYAL. | Partitava xsaya
> DAHYUupati xva|ipasyam
> Translation: "Delivered dish. Value: 40 calves 30
> silver siqlu.
> And it was presented to the king. | King Partitavas,
> the masters of the land property."



The Wikipedia article you cite attributes this linguistic hypothesis
to J. Harmatta, "Herodotus, Historian of the Cimmerians and the
Scythians", in W. Burkert (ed.) _Hérodote et les peuples non Grecs_,
Genève, Fondation Hardt, 1990, pp. 115-30.

The term "Hittite hieroglyphs" used by Harmatta to refer to the
Saqqez inscription was once commonly applied to Anatolian
hieroglyphs, but the current English scientific term is "Luwian
hieroglyphs" because the Anatolian language encoded in the
inscriptions is Luwian, not Hittite.

Harmatta's alleged "translation" is rejected by the Catalan
philologist A. Alemany in a note available online at

http://ddd.uab.es/pub/faventia/02107570v21n1p151.pdf ,

which I have tentatively translated into English:

<< In a surprising article, to say the least, János Harmatta
interprets an inscription in Luwian hieroglyphic (?) found on a
silver dish fragment coming from the "Scythian" grave of Ziwiye
(Saqqez, southeast of Lake Urmia, Iranian Kurdistan as "an adoption
and adaptation of the Hittite hieroglyphic alphabet (sic) to another
language", in this case "some Old Iranian dialect, apparently the
language of the Transcaucasian Scythians"; and then he reads in it a
sequence of signs like <par-tì-ta5-wa5> = *Pr.ta-tavah "who has
force for fighting", that is, the king Bartatua [a.k.a. Partatua,
mentioned in an Assyrian inscription of Esarhaddon (681-669 BC), who
even gave him a royal daughter in marriage, and generally identified
with Herodotus' Protothyes -- Francesco], so that we would be in
front of a document written up in his court or chancellery; the
problem is that no other epigraphic monument has come to us of the
language of the Scythians and this circumstance makes us difficult
to believe in Harmatta's decipherment. [Footnote 9: "About the
hieroglyphs (perhaps Urartian) of the artefact on question, cf.
Diakonoff (op. cit.): "whether they belong to a writing system is
not at all clear".] >>

The site of Saqqez was under the rule of the Manneans in the period
in question (first half of the 7th century BC). The neighbours of
Mannea to the north and northwest were the Urartians (of Hurrian
linguistic affiliation) and the Transcaucasian Scythians of whom
Bartatua was probably a king. The onomastic of the ruling classes of
Mannea, as revealed by Assyrian sources, has a strong Hurro-
Urartian, and secondarily Iranian component. Some scholars have
concluded that the Manneans (at least their elite) were a Hurrian
group subjected to an increasing Iranian penetration -- see at

http://www.iranica.com/newsite/articles/ot_grp10/ot_mannea_20060116.h
tml

Given the probable cultural links of the region of Saqqez with the
Hurro-Urartians in the 7th century BC, the "hieroglyphic
inscription" Harmatta attributes to the Transcaucasian Scythian king
Bartatua may be "written" in a Urartian-derived symbol system not
necessarily encoding a language. Compare the situation in Urartu: a
restricted number of still undeciphered "hieroglyphic inscriptions"
of various type have been found at first-millennium BCE Urartian
sites, but scholars who have studied them have concluded they are
for the most part pictographic in nature and are not likely to
represent a phonetically based writing system. The initial input for
this locally developed symbol system, however, is likely to have
come from hieroglyphic Luwian, a phonetically based script which is,
quite significantly, also used by Harmatta (although he calls
it "Hittite hieroglyphic") to decipher the Saqqez inscription -- at
least, he tried to! :^)

Best,
Francesco