From: Rick McCallister
Message: 54126
Date: 2008-02-25
>http://www.iranica.com/newsite/articles/ot_grp10/ot_mannea_20060116.h
> --- 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 ikar. UTA harsta XAYAL. | Partitava
> xaya
> > DAHYUupati xva|ipayam
> > Translation: "Delivered dish. Value: 40 calves 30
> > silver iqlu.
> > 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
>
>
> 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
>
>
>