Luwians

Indo-European-speaking people who appear to have established themselves in southwestern Anatolia by the late 3rd millennium BC; they were perhaps responsible for violent destruction levels in settlements such as Alaça Hüyük and Hisarlik. It has been suggested that these invaders in fact constituted the earliest wave of ‘HITTITES’ (in the broadest sense of the term). The Luwian language at least seems to have survived well into the neo-Hittite phase (early 1st millennium BC), when one of its dialects was transcribed into the so-called Hittite hieroglyphs.

The Luwian culture thrived in Bronze Age western Asia Minor. It has thus far been explored mainly by linguists, who learned about Luwian people through numerous documents from Hattuša, the capital of the Hittite civilization in central Asia Minor. Only a few excavations have thus far been conducted in formerly Luwian territories. Therefore, excavating archaeologists have not been taking Luwians into account in their reconstructions of the past. Once Aegean prehistory considers Western Asia Minor and its people, it becomes possible to develop a plausible explanation for the collapse of the Bronze Age cultures around the Eastern Mediterranean.

[Luvians]. An Indo-Europeanspeaking group in Anatolia, known mainly from references in Hittite records, from the Hittite Old Kingdom onwards. They appearto have migrated into Anatolia, perhaps from the Pontic steppes in southern Russia, in the 3rd millennium bc and spread through western Anatolia and as far as the Cilician plain. The Luwians are rather difficult to recognize in the archaeological record, but there is some evidence to suggest that it was they, rather than the Hittites, who developed the so-called ‘Hittite hieroglyphic’ writing system and it seems that by the 16th century bc Luwian had become the dominant spoken language of the Hittite state.