Carien

The Carian alphabets are a number of regional scripts used to write the Carian language of western Anatolia. It's geographical location is between the ancient regions of Lycia and Lydia, the alphabets of which have a lot of similarities with Carian. You can even conduct your own investigation, as we have the Lycian and Lydian scripts on the website.

As you are to discover further, the main Carian inscriptions were found in Caria, Mainland Greece and Egypt.

Carian was deciphered primarily through Egyptian–Carian bilingual tomb inscriptions, starting with John Ray in 1981. I don't know why, but I find it especially fascinating that to decipher a language you need to study not the books, not the papers, but the tombs of real people. People actually had to die for this language to be documented. Wow!

Wasn't there any evidence to this script before? Well, there was, but only a few sound values and the alphabetic order of the script. The readings of Ray and subsequent scholars were largely confirmed with a Carian–Greek bilingual inscription discovered in Kaunos in 1996, which for the first time verified personal names, but the identification of many letters remains provisional and debated, and a few are wholly unknown.

Speaking of structure, the Carian scripts consisted of 30 alphabetic letters, with several geographic variants in Caria and a homogeneous variant attested from the Nile delta, where Carian mercenaries fought for the Egyptian pharaohs. They were written left-to-right in Caria (apart from the Carian–Lydian city of Tralleis) and right-to-left in Egypt.