LYCIAN LANGUAGE. The native lat.guage of the ancient Lycians is only imperfectly known. In 1538 and 1540 Fellows discovered and copied thirty inscriptions in Ly•ia. Among these. one found at Xanthus covered the four sides of a large obelisk having, in addition to 235 lines of Lyeian. a Greek of 1• hexameters. The others were all tom!) inscriptions, one of them. found at Lim•ra, a bilimmal. Greek and 1.yeian. Another bilingual found at Antiphellus was pub lished by Grotefend in 1542. The same year Daniell and Spratt and Forbes copied 36 Lycian inscription'-, among them two bilinguals from La misii and Thos. Sell( inborn in 1841-42 and again in 1831 gathered a rich collection, published after his death by Schmidt. A number of I,yeian coins were found and published by Fellows in 1855. The bilingual decree of Pixodarns, Carian ruler (B.(•. 340-335), was published by Schmidt in 1869. Most of the inscriptions have been found at Limyra : others come from Nautilus, Anti phellus, Myra, Telmessus, Cadyanda, Cyame, Pinara, Sum, and Candyba. They are written in an alphalwt which has borrowed the Greek letters and adopted new signs for a number of sounds. The forms of the Greek let ters show a greater resemblance to the Doric than to the Ionian. If this speaks for a higher age, the presenee of x and cb, unless it is a later acqui sition, would indicate a comparatively late origin of the Lycian alphabet. Strong reasons have been
adduced by Sharpe, Lassen. Savelsberg, and La garde for the opinion that the Lycian is an Iranian language, akin to the Avestan and the old Persian and also to the Armenian. P seems to have changed into as in Armenian, and as f into h in the Kurdish (q.v.) : on the other hand, s is not changed into h in the Lycisn. The time of the inscriptions can be approximately fixed by their general similarity and by the known date of l'ixodarus. Whether Savelsberg is correct in identifying Darius 11. and Artaxerxes III. on the Nautilus monument yet be determined with certainty. But his theory that the obelisk: celebrates a greet effort to throw off the Persian yoke in the generation preceding Alexander, though somewhat bold, is at least plausible. Con sult the works mentioned in the article LYCTA, and Grotelend. in Zcitschrlit fur die Kande des Morgenlandes, vol. v.; Texier, Description de Alineure faits par ordre du gourernement de 18.l.3-.37, vol. iii. (Paris, 1849) ; Las sen, in Zeitschrift (ler deutsehen morgenliindisch en Gesellschaft, vol. x.; Alo•iz Schmidt, The Lyrian Inscriptions (London. 1869) : Neer ly hische hisehriften (Jena. ISO) ; Savelsberg, Bri tniigc En&ifferung lakisehen Sprachdenk mliler, i. and ii. (Bonn, 1874-78).