Luwian

Luwian was an Indo-European language of the Anatolian branch, closely related to Hittite and attested from the sixteenth through the seventh centuries BCE in Anatolia and northern Syria. It survives in two written traditions: Cuneiform Luwian occurs mainly in passages and tablets from Hittite archives, while Hieroglyphic Luwian uses the indigenous Anatolian hieroglyphic script, which is unrelated to Egyptian hieroglyphs. After the Hittite Empire fell around 1200 BCE, hieroglyphic inscriptions continued in Iron Age states including Carchemish, Melid, and Tabal until Assyrian expansion in the seventh century BCE. The discovery of the Luwian–Phoenician bilingual at Karatepe in 1947 aided decipherment, and revised sign readings in the 1970s established more securely that the hieroglyphic texts recorded Luwian.