ORAL TRADITION
          IN HOMER, PRESOCRATICS, PLATO, ARISTOTLE
                Fifteen (B)

I.D. Greeks 0022

This section subsumes and brings fresh evidence for the thesis . . . that the language of Troy and the Trojans in the northeast corner of Anatolia was a variety of Luvian, close to if probably not identical with the language of our cuniform Luvan monuments of the middle of the 2nd millennium . . .

waarša=tta ÍD-ti [nam]amman

MUN-ša=pa alati uwa[niyati] upamman

waarša =tta zsl[a ÍD-i] anda nawa iti

MUN-ša=pa=[tta z]ila ali uwaniya na[wa it]i

_______________________________

(Luvian) “The water is led from the river

and the salt is brought from the steep rock face;

the water to the river will nevermore go back

and the salt to the steep rock face nevermore will go back.”19[1]

We recognize at once the rhythmic, grammatically parallel, syntactic strophic syle of the Luvian spell, which is clearly verbal art.

The adjective ali- ‘high, lofty steep’ of mountains, rock face, may have been borrowed, perhaps as a toponym, by Mycenean Greek speakers and transformed into ‘steep (rock)’. The Luvian form al-i-, with lengthened a in open syllable, may be related to the family of Latin al-tus.

Now this Luvian adjective has one further attestation, which has serious implications: it is an epithet for the city of Wilusa. The city of Wiluša or Wilušiya is well attested in Hittite texts, as a city of the Luvian-speaking Arzawa lands of Western Anatolia, with a king Alakšanduš whose name immediately recalled Alexandros, the other name of the Trojan prince Paris, son of Priam. For this and other reasons the identification of Wilusa with Greek W)?lios, one of the names of Troy, was made long ago and is today widely, though not universally, accepted (Güterbock, 1986; skeptical Bryce 1988).

It is therefore with considerable interest that Wilusa is also found in a very special Luvian-language context and genre: the ‘sacred songs’ (Hittite šuppa uddar) of the rituals of the cultic city of Istanuwa. The location of the city is unknown, but its name must be derived from that of the Anatoliab Sun-deity, Hittite Ištanu- from Hattic Eštan. Among our Luvian texts the rituals from Istanuwa occupy a place apart, as magical texts, though morphology and syntax are straightforwardly Luvian. It is possible, though not certain, that they represent a special dialect, but the real difference is that these ‘sacred words’ ‘develop different themes’, in Laroche’s phrase. The languafe describing the ritual is Hittite; the Luvian parts are incipits (‘Liedanfänge’ Starke 1985: 300) of interspersed choral chants and responsions, which are sung (SĚRRU, išhamiškanzi). In short they are Luvian verbal art, Luvian poetry. Following Starke ibid, there are good linguistic grounds for dating the Istanuwa texts as a group to the Old Hittite period (16th century).

The text to which I called particular attention in Watkins 1986 is KBo 4.11, 45-6 (Starke 1985:339-42):

EGIR-ŠUDŠuwašuran ekuzi

Ahh=ata=ta alati awienta Wilušati

(Hittite) Then he drinks to the god Suwasuna (and they sing)

(Luvian) “When they came from steep Wilusa.”

As I suggested there, we have the beginning of a Luvian epic lay about the city of Wilusa, we we may equate with (W)ilios or Troy: a “Wilusiad”, This view has been accepted by some (Eicher 1993)m received with skepticism by others (Bryce 1988). But there can be no disagreement about the poetics of this line of Luvian verse, which is quite clear. We have two half lines with rhyme, and an alliteration bridges the break. The word order has been permuted according to the by now familiar pattern of Indo-European syntax, the adjective (epithet) distracted from its constituent noun to straddle the verb, and both adjective and noun adjoining metrical boundary. All that can scarcely be accidental.

ahh=ata=ta alati ¦ a WIenta WIlušati.

In this single line of Luvian poetrywe can plainly see the same aesthetic and the same poetic devices—phonetic, morphologicak, and syntactic—which inform the mantrasof the Indo-Iranian kavis and the epic and lyric verses of the Greek aoidoi. As well as signaling the stylistic figure of the distracted noun phrase, the rhyme in alati ¦ wilušati, at the end of successive hemistiches in the privileged poem-initial position of prominence, can be exactly paralleled by the end rhymes in RIG VEDA 4.53.7cd, where lines occupy the privileged line-final position of prominence:

sá nah ksapábhir áhabhis ca jinvatu

prajávantam rayím asmé sám invatu

Let him strengthen us by night and by day,

let him produce for us wealth in offspring.

A close variant of our Luvian line occurs in another text, also as a first line . . .

Alati=tta ahha zitiš ¦ awaita [Wilušati]

ahh+ata=ta alati ¦ awienta Wilušati

When the man came from steep [Wilusa]

When they came from steep Wilusa.

Compare from the initial pada of the first and third verse of the same Rigvedic hymn, 6.23.1a, 3a:

Sutá ít tvám ¦ nímisla indra some

Páta sutám ¦ índro astu sómam

You are indulging, o Indra, in the pressed soma

Let Indra be the drinker of the pressed soma.

The positions relative to metrical boundary of the distracted noun-phrase constituents, as well as their order (Adj. + N), are identical in the two languages, Luvian and Vedic. The number and the precision of the similarities in the manipulation of poetic formulas are such as we must assume inheritance from a common poetic grammar Ó, just as the morphophonemic precision of the equation Hittite 3sg. Kuen-zi/3pl. kun-anzi and Vedic 3sg. hán-ti / 3pl. ghn-ánti is by itself sufficient to require assumption of inheritance from a common grammar O . . . it is clear that there is a significant inherited Indo-European component in their poetics . . .

In Wakins 1988 I called attention to the similarity of our two Luvian lines in thematics and poetic devices to the first line (subsequently repeated as a sort of refrain) of the Old Welsh epic lay of the Gododdin,

Gwyr a AETH GatrAETH

The men who went to Catraeth . . .,

And to the first lines of the Cyclic Epic Aithiopis (fr. I Allen):



"Thus they performed the burial of Hector. Then came the Amazon,

daughter of great-hearted man-slaying Ares."

Similarly Il. 3.189:



"On that day when the Amazons came, peers of men."

For the poetic devices of sound texture compare the notation of the Old Welsh line with the same line of Luvian:

Ahh=ata=ta alati ¦ a WIenta WIlušati

Alati=tta ahha zitiš ¦ aWIta [WIlušati].

Another, more striking thematic link is the traditional epithet for the city of (W) ilios in Homer: ‘steep’,. It occurs 6 times, always with verse-initial (Il. 16.773, etc.) Is the semantic identity of Greek ‘steep Ilios’ and Luvian alati Wilušati ‘steep Wilusa’ just coincidence, or just an elementary parallel to describe a walled city? Or is it part of a common poetic tradition, a formulaic convention sharedletween the two geographically contiguous languages, Luvian and Greek? ‘If that were so , it would raise all manner of implications for both history and literature in 2nd millennium Greece and Anatolia,’ as I concluded in Watkins 1986. If the Luvians had a song or epic lay about Wilusa—(W)ilios---Troy---does it not follow that the inhabitants of Wilusa-(W)ilios—Troy spoke Luvian. But it is one more link, and a not inconsiderable one . . .

In the Hittite Alaksandus treaty the gods of the city of Wilusa are called to witness. The only one mentioned by name is D]a-ap-pali-u-na-aš . . the name was already by Forrer equated with that of the Greek god Apollo, in the common or Proto-Greek form apelion securely reconstructible from Doric (Cretan, Laconian, Corinthian, etc.), Cypriote to-i-a-pe-i-lo-ni ICS 215, b4 and especially Mycenean [a-]pe-ro2-neKNE 842.3 (Ruijgh 1967:274). As originally proposed by Burkert 1975 the name is derived from a word preserved in Doric ‘assembly’; but as Peters shows the original meaning must have been rather the Indo-European institution of the “Männerbund”, the ‘hunter-warrior society of unmarried and propertiless young aristocrats’ (McCone). Apollo (*apelon) in this aspect was the leader of such a band (*apelia). One might suppose—it is no more than that—that Alaksandus of Wilusa took Appaliunas as his personal god at the same time and from the same cultural source as his ‘international’ name, Greek Aleksandros, perhaps from personal experience in an *apelia.

Apollo’s role in the later Greek pantheon is of course much broader. Whether his later connection with the sun can be projected back to the 2nd millennium is uncertain at best, but it is clear in the ILIAD that Apollo is the special patron of the city of Troy, Ilios, and the Trojans. The syntagmatic and paradigmatic linking of god and city would seem to form a cultural continuum from Luvian to the Greek (the determiner D marks gods, URU cities):

DUTU = Istanu--------DSuwasuna---------DAppaliunas------



URUIstanuwa-----------Wilusa---------------URUWilusa---------

(Watkins goes into examples beyond my comprehension) . . . I conclude by pointing out a curious phrasal coincidence between Luvian and Homeric Greek, which is shared to my knowledge with no other Indo-European language. . . (Watkins goes into examples beyond my comprehension) . . . Wackernagel’s insight on t?? ta? is vindicated, I would suggestby later evidence of which he could have had no knowledge, the Luvian ‘locatival’ enclitic sentential particle tar precisely in combination with the indefinite relative pronoun kuiš=tar26 the sequence identical to the Greek combination with the interrogative pronoun t?? ta?, both from the earlier *kis tar (this is not reproduced correctly). The ‘coincidental’ similarity is the more striking when we realize that in the 2nd millennium, long before the elimination of labiovelars in Greek, the phonetic sequence kís tar in both languages would have been for practical purposes substantively identical. (Watkins goes into examples beyond my comprehension) . . .

Now the Luvian particle tar is also found enclitic to clause-initial finite verb: mammanna=tar ‘regard with favor!”(2x). Compare the Iliadic formulas in verse-initial position ta 3.398, for all of which the vulgate reads t? ? ??’. The semantic unity of all these verbs, ‘shuddered’, ‘wailed’, ‘shrieked’, ‘was awestruck’, as well as their morphological and phrasal rigidity, would suggest that they are ultimately all variants or developments of a single formula . . .

The particles Luvian tar and all the but moribund Homeric Greek ta? share both the same physical shape and the same syntactic deployment; the distribution is unique among the Indo-European languages. It is tempting to see in this an areal feature common to both languages at the geographical point of their contact, Western Anatolia. That in Homer tar is confined to fixed formulas raises again the possibility of a component of a shared poetic tradition in Anatolian Luvian and Greek in the 2nd millennium. The presence of the personal name Aswios (a-si-wi-jo) in Mycenean Greek texts, clearly derived from the Western Anatolian (‘Arzawan’) territorial name Aššuwa in Hittite sources, is ample evidence for possible channels for the connection . . .


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