Carian alphabets

Carian
Carian;
	Inscription in Carian of the name 𐊨𐊣𐊠𐊦𐊹𐊸, qlaλiś
Script type	Alphabet
Time period	7th to 1st centuries BCE
Direction	Left-to-right, right-to-left script
Languages	Carian language
Related scripts
Parent systems	Egyptian hieroglyphs Proto-Sinaitic Phoenician Greek alphabet ? Carian; ; ; ;
Sister systems	Lycian, Lydian, Phrygian
ISO 15924
ISO 15924	Cari (201), Carian
Unicode
Unicode alias	Carian
Unicode range	U+102A0–U+102DF
	This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

The Carian alphabets are a number of regional scripts used to write the Carian language of western Anatolia. They consisted of some 30 alphabetic letters, with several geographic variants in Caria and a homogeneous variant attested from the Nile delta, where Carian mercenaries fought for the Egyptian pharaohs. They were written left-to-right in Caria (apart from the Carian–Lydian city of Tralleis) and right-to-left in Egypt.

Carian was deciphered primarily through Egyptian–Carian bilingual tomb inscriptions, starting with John Ray in 1981; previously only a few sound values and the alphabetic nature of the script had been demonstrated. The readings of Ray and subsequent scholars were largely confirmed with a Carian–Greek bilingual inscription discovered in Kaunos in 1996, which for the first time verified personal names, but the identification of many letters remains provisional and debated, and a few are wholly unknown.

The Carian alphabet resembles the Greek alphabet, but the exact Greek variant from which it could have originated, has not yet been identified. The main reason for this is that some of the Greek letters have different sound values in Carian.^[5] Two hypotheses have been suggested to explain this. The first is that the Greek letters were randomly attributed to phonetic values; though some letters retained their Greek value. The second proposed by Adiego (2007), is "that the Carian alphabet underwent a strong process of cursivisation, dramatically changing the form of many letters. At a certain point this graphic system underwent a change to 'capital' letters, for which the Greek capital letters were used as models - but now only from a formal point of view, disregarding their phonetic values (...).".^[4]

^ Palaeolexicon. "The Carian word qlaλiś".
^ Himelfarb, Elizabeth J. "First Alphabet Found in Egypt", Archaeology 53, Issue 1 (Jan./Feb. 2000): 21.
^ Cross, Frank Moore (2018-08-14). Leaves from an Epigrapher's Notebook: Collected Papers in Hebrew and West Semitic Palaeography and Epigraphy. BRILL. p. 58. ISBN 978-90-04-36988-7.
^ ^a ^b Boyes, Philip J.; Steele, Philippa M. (2020). Understanding Relations Between Scripts II: Early Alphabets. Oxbow Books. p. 115. ISBN 978-1-78925-092-3.
^ ^a ^b Scriptsource.org - Carian "Visually, the letters bear a close resemblance to Greek letters. Decipherment was initially attempted on the assumption that those letters which looked like Greek represented the same sounds as their closest visual Greek equivalents. However it has since been established that the phonetic values of the two scripts are very different. For example the theta θ symbol represents ‘th’ in Greek but ‘q’ in Carian. Carian was generally written from left to right, although Egyptian writers wrote primarily from right to left. It was written without spaces between words."

[palaeolexicon-1] Palaeolexicon. "The Carian word qlaλiś".

[2] Himelfarb, Elizabeth J. "First Alphabet Found in Egypt", Archaeology 53, Issue 1 (Jan./Feb. 2000): 21.

[3] Cross, Frank Moore (2018-08-14). Leaves from an Epigrapher's Notebook: Collected Papers in Hebrew and West Semitic Palaeography and Epigraphy. BRILL. p. 58. ISBN 978-90-04-36988-7.

[:3-4] Boyes, Philip J.; Steele, Philippa M. (2020). Understanding Relations Between Scripts II: Early Alphabets. Oxbow Books. p. 115. ISBN 978-1-78925-092-3.

[:4-5] Scriptsource.org - Carian "Visually, the letters bear a close resemblance to Greek letters. Decipherment was initially attempted on the assumption that those letters which looked like Greek represented the same sounds as their closest visual Greek equivalents. However it has since been established that the phonetic values of the two scripts are very different. For example the theta θ symbol represents ‘th’ in Greek but ‘q’ in Carian. Carian was generally written from left to right, although Egyptian writers wrote primarily from right to left. It was written without spaces between words."

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