Phrygian is an Indo-European language of Anatolia, known for its distribution of fragmentary texts attested from circa the eighth century bc to the third century ad. Specialized publications have long treated Phrygian philology and linguistics. The present volume seeks to meet the need for an accessible and comprehensive synthesis. It is a revised version of the author's 2018 PhD dissertation “Lexicon of the Phrygian inscriptions” from the University of Barcelona. The 681-page tome introduces the linguistic and lexical aspects of Phrygian along with editions of all texts available (including mentions of the few texts inaccessible to Obrador-Cursach) at the time of its publication.
Chapter 1 summarizes the volume's purposes and methodology. Chapter 2 elucidates the dating, writing material, archaeological contexts, provenances, and typology of Phrygian texts. Chapter 3 tackles details and problems of the Phrygian and Greek alphabets used for Phrygian inscriptions, with discussions of Old Phrygian letter-forms 18, 19, 21, 22, 24 listed in CIPPh (C. Brixhe and M. Lejeune, Corpus des inscriptions paleo-phrygiennes, Paris, 1984). Obrador-Cursach treats the problematic CIPPh letter-forms no. 20 and 23 as variants of <k>. The author addresses the difficulties in ascertaining the value of certain letter-forms and also discusses the problems in assessing the Greek script for New Phrygian inscriptions. Most of them are known today from their earliest hand-copies and only 20 out of 188 of these texts have survived and are presently available for collation. A desideratum is an exhaustive and critical study of Phrygian palaeography, with photos and drawings of the inscriptions and all attested letter-forms. A promising project in this direction is Paleography and Dating of the Old Phrygian Inscriptions: The Earliest Phases (starting 2020) carried out by Rostislav Oreshko as part of the European Research Council's project “Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems” at Cambridge University.
Chapter 4 delineates the fundamentals of Phrygian phonology, morphology, and syntax, including difficult topics such as the mutation of stops (Lautverschiebung). This is followed by a discussion of Phrygian's place among Indo-European languages, emphasizing its linguistic affinities with Greek dialects in light of phonological, morphological, and lexical isoglosses. The chapter ends with discussions of bilingualism, loanwords and personal names attested vis-à-vis languages in contact with Phrygian: Greek (emphasized especially due to Middle/New Phrygian and the bilinguals), Hittite (with difficulties ascertaining direct Hittite loanwords in Phrygian), Luwian, Lydian, Aramaic, Old Persian, Elamite, Assyrian, Galatian, and Latin. Obrador-Cursach's linguistic assessments, including the problems comparing Phrygian with Thracian, Macedonian, and Albanian (p. 121 notes 69–70), can complement archaeological and historical data concerning a Palaeo-Balkan Sprachbund and/or cultural zone in relation to the Phrygians, as proposed in earlier research (for example S. Yankieva, Предгръцка Беотия, Sofia, 1994; contributions by M. Vassileva and A. Poruciuc in N. Tuna, Z. Aktüre and M. Lynch (eds), Thracians and Phrygians, Ankara, 1998). Furthermore, new onomastic research will shed further light into the centuries-long Phrygian presence in Anatolia's cultural zones. Luwian names from Old Phrygian inscriptions at Kerkenes Dağı provide a demonstrative example (M. Weeden, “Tuwati and Wasusarma: imitating the behavior of Assyria”, Iraq 72, 2010, p. 45 n. 45).
Chapter 5 (pp. 154–411) contains the main thrust of the volume – a comprehensive Phrygian lexicon. This is followed by a short and critical chapter on 28 glosses as indirect sources for Phrygian while excluding names considered Phrygian by mainly Greek and Latin sources. The lexicon's organization benefits from the models of Roberto Gusmani's Lydisches Wörterbuch (Heidelberg, 1964, 1980) and Günter Neumann's Glossar des Lykischen (Wiesbaden, 2007) and discusses alternative interpretations of the lexemes (p. 2). As Obrador-Cursach states, “most Phrygian words remain unexplained” (p. 118). Each lemma is provided with grammatical forms, written variants, and references in the specialized literature. Cases of ambiguous word boundaries are marked with segmentation. Two objectives work in tandem. The lexical entries discuss varying interpretations but omit proposals not based on carefully discussed contexts from the inscriptions (p. 6). Informative supplementary methods are comparative analysis of Indo-European cognates (primarily from Greek and Latin) and comparison of themes, calques, and formulaic expressions in appropriate contexts to infer lexemes and syntax.
The volume concludes with a catalogue of the Old (395 texts, dated c. 800–330 bc), Middle (one text, with the earliest clear use of the Greek script, dates to before or during the mid-330s bc) and New Phrygian (118 texts, dated c. first to third century ad) inscriptions (pp. 427–613, with maps of findspots pp. 614–8) along with Greek inscriptions that: (a) are calques of a Phrygian curse inscription; (b) contain Phrygian words; or (c) were previously misidentified with the Phrygian corpus. The editions cover almost all known Phrygian texts. They are an invaluable resource even as more discoveries have been made in the short period since the volume went into print, such as the Old Phrygian stele at Eski Cami Höyük, Eskişehir, in a survey headed by Rahşan Tamsü Polat (R.T. Polat, Y. Polat, and A. Lubotsky, “An idol-shaped stele with an Old Phrygian inscription in the territory of Nakoleia”, Gephyra 19, 2020 45–67), and fragments from Gordion (a black polished handle with an incised Phrygian inscription reported in C.B. Rose and A. Gürsan-Salzmann, Friends of Gordion Newsletter, October 2019, 14) and Tieion (fragments mentioned by Şahin Yıldırım in F. Akıllı and S. Güler, “‘Oldest’ inscriptions unearthed in northern Turkey”, Anadolu Agency, 09.12.2020).
The catalogue is accompanied by concordances that match publications with the registered inscriptions. The indexes cover divine names, personal names, and common words mostly from Anatolian and other contact languages mentioned throughout the work. There is much that can be gleaned from the vast data collected by the author, going beyond these selected indexes. The Phrygians were an integral and vital part of Iron Age Anatolian history. The provision of nearly all Phrygian texts in edited form and with a critical lexicon provides a vital resource for students of Anatolian languages and history tackling the fragmentary nature of the Phrygian corpora. Obrador-Cursach is to be congratulated for providing the scholarly community with a comprehensive tool for the Phrygian language, texts, and lexicon.
