Lemnos stele in the context of "Athenians"

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⭐ Core Definition: Lemnos stele

The Lemnian language was spoken on the island of Lemnos, Greece, in the second half of the 6th century BC. It is mainly attested by an inscription found on a funerary stele, termed the Lemnos stele, discovered in 1885 near Kaminia. Fragments of inscriptions on local pottery show that it was spoken there by a community. In 2009, a newly discovered inscription was reported from the site of Hephaistia, the principal ancient city of Lemnos. Lemnian is largely accepted as being a Tyrsenian language, and as such related to Etruscan and Raetic. After the Athenians conquered the island in the latter half of the 6th century BC, Lemnian was replaced by Attic Greek.

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Lemnos stele in the context of Alphabets of Anatolia

Various alphabetic writing systems were in use in Iron Age Anatolia to record Anatolian languages and Phrygian. Several of these languages had previously been written with logographic and syllabic scripts.

The alphabets of Asia Minor proper share characteristics that distinguish them from the earliest attested forms of the Greek alphabet. Many letters in these alphabets resemble Greek letters but have unrelated readings, most extensively in the case of Carian. The Phrygian and Lemnian alphabets by contrast were early adaptations of regional variants of the Greek alphabet; the earliest Phrygian inscriptions are contemporary with early Greek inscriptions, but contain Greek innovations such as the letters Φ and Ψ which did not exist in the earliest forms of the Greek alphabet.

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LINKED FROM (PARENTS)
← Alphabets of Anatolia ← Alphabets of Asia Minor
LINKS TO (CHILDREN)
Lemnos → Greece → Stele → Kaminia, Lemnos → Hephaistia → Tyrsenian language → Etruscan language → Rhaetic language → Athenians → Attic Greek →