Communication in Ancient Anatolia

2026-07-22

The project addresses the question of messages, modes and participants in the communication of three Anatolian cultures, Lydians, Luwians and Phrygians, ca. 1200–546 BCE. Living in adjacent territories, they were verifiably in contact with one another. They are normally studied in isolation by different academic subjects, leading to missed intercultural references and interconnections, and preventing the reconstruction of a comprehensive picture. The three cultures, their interesting and diverse text sources, their relationships with one another and their (dis)unity as cultural entities are currently underresearched, and only parts of their text corpora are available in modern editions. The project will be the first to study both internal and external sources from other Ancient Near Eastern and Classical texts together, using a combined semiotic and narratological approach examining text structure, processes of meaning-making, communication and transmission. Texts and their material supports not only generate and exchange meaning, they also preserve information on communication processes in the context of specific realms. Reading these texts with a focus on narrative and discourse will allow a new insight into formative parameters of ancient societies, especially values, cognitive patterns, and the needs and motifs of the participants. This marks a huge shift from traditional, event-based readings towards an analysis of belief and behaviour. The project will be ground-breaking in its application and adaption of concepts from semiotics and narratology, which were developed for the study of the modern world and have never before been applied to the study of these ancient texts. The project will draw a new picture of cultural clusters and their parameters, and provide new data for understanding ancient and modern identities and the potential of cultural differences. Its novel insight into communication can be extended to other Ancient World studies.

Italy

2025-12-15