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Mysians on the Borders of Lydia: The ‘Old-Phrygian’ Inscription on the Spindle-Whorl from the Thyateira Region (HP-101) Revisited

  • Rostyslav Oreshko EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: January 17, 2025
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Abstract

This article is dedicated to the Archaic (late 7th or early 6th c. BC) inscription on a spindle whorl coming from the Lydian-Mysian borderland, presenting a new interpretation of the text and arguing for its connection with the Mysian inhabitants of the region. After an introduction outlining the status quaestionis and addressing recent evidence concerning the ethnolinguistic identity of Mysians (§ 1), the paper presents a detailed analysis of the alphabet of the graffito (§ 2) and observations on its possible pragmatic and sociolinguistic context (§ 3), which are followed by three linguistic studies of the words identifiable in the text: the preposition per, likely a dialectal variant of the Phrygian por (§ 4), and two personal names, a masculine Dages (§ 5) and a feminine *Bastes (§ 6).

Acknowledgements

This paper is a part of the project ‘Balkan Peoples of Anatolia: Migration, Assimilation and Cultural Contact in Anatolia around 1400 BC–300 BC’ (2021–2023), which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101033019.

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Published Online: 2025-01-17
Published in Print: 2025-01-14

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