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Mopsos

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

R. D. Barnett
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Extract

In 1946 an expedition led by Professor H. Bossert and his Turkish colleagues of the Institute for Research in Ancient Oriental Civilisations at the University of Istanbul investigated a site, now called Karatepe, in Cilicia, in a wild and remote part of the Taurus Mountains overlooking the Ceyhan River. There they found a small citadel fortified by a wall and ornamented with lions in the gateways. They excavated the gateways and found them to be flanked by sculptured slabs and inscriptions partly in Phoenician, partly in Hittite hieroglyphs. A further excavation on the summit of the hill found other inscriptions in these two languages, which finally, when compared, proved to be versions of the same text. The long-sought bilingual which would interpret Hittite hieroglyphic script had been found. Confirmation was now to be available of the slow and hesitant interpretations of the hieroglyphs which had been attempted over ninety years.

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Notes
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The Journal of Hellenic Studies , Volume 73 , November 1953, pp. 140 - 143
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1953

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References

1 The name appears to mean ‘lover of the [Sun-God] Wa(n)das’. The native name *Wandas or *Oundas appears in such Anatolian names as (Lycian) and (Cilician) (apud Sundwall, Die Einheimischen Namen der Lykier).

2 The form Daniuna recorded on the Egyptian monuments is to be derived from *Daniya-wana-. The ending -wana(s) is the regular ethnic suffix in the Hittite hieroglyphic language. The contraction of wa or uwa to u is also common in that speech.

3 As to the claim that D. invented the penteconter and the suggestion that the Daniuna were ship-builders, this may not be quite far-fetched. In Biblical times the stock expression for an ocean-going ship is ‘a ship of Taršiš’. Taršiš is not Tartessus in Spain, as sometimes asserted, but Tarsus (once the port of Adana), in Phoenician: Tarz, the Hittite hieroglyphic equivalent for which the bilingual now shows would be *Taršiš or *Tarziš. The Hebrew word for ship used in this expression is 'oniyah, derived from an older Canaanite form 'anawiyah, which appears in a gloss in the Amarna Letters (fourteenth century). But this is no Semitic word. What can it be but some form of Indo-European root of —navis? (I owe this suggestion to Dr. H. H. Figulla.) This Amarna gloss makes it plain that in the fourteenth century B.C. a sea-faring people of Indo-European speech had already given its word to the ship in the eastern Mediterranean. Both Biblical and, if Danaos is connected with the Daniuna, Greek tradition seem to agree in referring the origin of this type of ship and its name to Cilicia. The obscure question of early Mediterranean shipping cannot be further discussed here.

4 This identification was put forward by the present writer as soon as the Phoenician version was published (see Iraq 1946p. 56 ff.). Simultaneously the same idea was put forward and published in Germany by A. Alt, a few weeks earlier. Mopsos is no late invention; he was known to Callinos (seventh century B.C.) at Ephesus. See Roscher, s.v. Mopsos.

4a See Furumark, , Opusc. Arch. 6, 1950Google Scholar, and Wainwright, , Asiatic Keftiu, A.J.A., 56, 1952Google Scholar for another interpretation.

5 Another link with Pamphylia is that Azitawad invokes the god Ba'al Krntrš, who has been plausibly identified as the Ba'al of Celenderis in Pamphylia.

6 Forrer pointed many years ago to a gloss containing evidence that there existed already in the late second millennium in Western Anatolia a language or dialect related to Hittite, in which Hittite k was replaced by p. This, he showed, might be Lydian. (Forrer, Die Pippid-Sprache, in his Forschungen, Heft 2.)

7 Götze, , Madduwattaš, pp. 36 and 40Google Scholar (pointed out by Bossert, , Oriens II, p. 119Google Scholar). (Is Polypoetes perhaps a garbled version of Madduwattaš?)

8 For an account of these events see Gurney, O. R., The Hittites, 38, 46 ff.Google Scholar, also ibid., for a summary of the objections to Forrer's fanciful identifications of Attarišiyaš and others with Greek heroes.

9 Stubbings, , Mycenean Pottery from the Levant, p. 100.Google Scholar

10 Caratelli, , Jahrb. für Kleinas. Forsch. I.Google Scholar

11 Özgüç, , Belleten, 1948, 266–7.Google Scholar