Ancient Languages and Civilizations11 Contacts of Peoples in the Hittite Post World

Pre-Classical Anatolia has always been a crossroads of languages and peoples. This volume provides a state-of-the-art study of linguistic and cultural contacts in Anatolia, with specific focus on the Aegean interface and on the Ancient Near East in the 1st millennium BC. During the 1st millennium BCE, Pre-Classical Anatolia acted as a melting pot and crossroads of languages, cultures and peoples. The political map of the world changed after the collapse of the Bronze Age, the horizon of sea routes was expanded to new interregional networks, new writing systems emerged including the alphabets. The Mediterranean world changed dramatically, and Indo-European languages – Luwic, Lydian, but also Phrygian and Greek – interacted with increasing intensity with each other and with the neighbouring idioms and cultures of the Syro-Mesopotamian, Iranian and Aegean worlds. With an innovative combination of linguistic, historical and philological work, this book will provide a state-of-the-art description of the contacts at the linguistic and cultural boundary between the East and the West.