Anatolian Hieroglyphs

Anatolian hieroglyphs were common on the Anatolian peninsula from the 14th to the 7th century BC. In some sources they can be called Hittite or Luwian because they were used in the Hittite state to write the Luwian language. It seems that this script was created specially for Luwian, as manuscripts in other languages have not been found. Before its appearance, the Hittites used modified Akkadian cuneiform. By the 7th century BC, hieroglyphs were completely replaced by and alphabets.

The Anatolian script is a mixture of ideographic and syllabic writing systems. Some characters might convey an entire word or just one syllable, depending on the context. Sentences consisted of hieroglyphs or syllables or both.

The texts were almost always written horizontally, but sometimes graphemes would be placed one above the other. The direction was different: from left to right, and vice versa, plus boustrophedon (when these two directions are combined). In Unicode, character outlines presuppose writing from left to right. Otherwise, the characters have to be reversed.