Lydian

Lydian is an extinct Anatolian language of the Indo-European family, spoken in the kingdom of Lydia in western Anatolia and attested in inscriptions dating from roughly 700 to 200 BC, spanning the era of Lydian independence under kings such as Croesus through the periods of Persian and then Hellenistic rule. It was written in its own strictly alphabetic script of 26 signs related to the Greek alphabet, and most surviving texts, fewer than thirty of which are more than a few words long, come from the Lydian capital of Sardis, appearing as funerary epitaphs and official decrees. Decipherment advanced dramatically after the 1912 discovery of a bilingual inscription in Lydian and Aramaic at Sardis, which functioned as a Rosetta Stone for the language. Some Lydian inscriptions show deliberate poetic features such as assonance and meter, suggesting a literary as well as an administrative use for the written language before it died out under the pressure of Greek and Persian culture.