Lycian was an
alphabet used throughout the
Anatolian area of
Asia Minor from 400 to 300
BCE. Tracing its lineage directly to the
Greek alphabet, with over 80% of its symbols borrowed, most of the innovation was in the invention of a few new letters to represent
nasal vowels and
consonants not present in Greek. The
language written with Lycian is not fully understood (it was not
Indo-European), but
bilingual texts and documentation provide good enough information about its sound systems. It was probably used in parallel or secondary to
Hittite cuneiform, which was far more established.
The alphabet was composed of 29 letters: 6 vowels and 23 consonants. There were no capital letters. Writing nearly aways flowed from left to right, modeling the Greeks. Individual vowels had several different signs with which they could be written, marking distinctions of quality and length within a word. A break-off dialect from main Lycian, marked by dental transformations and absence of certain letters, was also written with Lycian. The letters look like archaic forms of Greek, from which they were derived.