The Phoenician Inscriptions from Anatolia and their linguistic relevance

"The Phoenician inscriptions from Anatolia and their linguistic relevance" is a webinar held by Vladimir Olivero on September 24th, 2026, within the series ALPHA (Anatolian Linguistics, Philology, History and Archaeology), an academic lecture initiative organized within the ERC-funded project CAncAn – Communication in Ancient Anatolia (ERC Grant Agreement No. 101088363).

In this lecture, Vladimir Olivero addresses the importance of the Phoenician inscriptions from Anatolia for the reconstruction of the Phoenician language, noting that most of the surviving textual and linguistic evidence for Phoenician originates not from the homeland but from Anatolia itself. The lecture offers an overview of the grammar of the Anatolian corpus — vocabulary, morphology, and syntax — and situates it within the broader dialectal landscape of Phoenician, showing that Anatolian Phoenician aligns closely with Sidonian and Tyrian Phoenician, while standing apart from Byblian, a well-defined dialect whose distinctive features persist even in later inscriptions from Byblos and are notably absent from the Anatolian material. Olivero singles out a set of features attested in the Anatolian corpus that sharpen our understanding of Phoenician more broadly, including orthographic sandhi phenomena, occurring almost exclusively in epigraphic material and paralleled in Epigraphic Hebrew; the use of the morphologically plural form 'lm for "god" with singular reference, attested twice in Karatepe C but absent from Karatepe A and B, with a further parallel outside Anatolia in the Silver Amulet from Byblos, where it refers to the goddess Astarte; and a tendency for the demonstrative and the definite article to co-occur. Particular attention is devoted to verbal morphology, including the suppletive paradigm of the verb "to go" (hlk/hwk), the Yiphil of hpk, and the Qal of lhm "to fight," with a focus on the epigraphic reading of the Kulamuwa inscription and comparison with Moabite and Aramaic evidence. On the syntactic-pragmatic level, Olivero highlights the use of the infinitive absolute as a narrative form elaborating on events or actions initially introduced by a finite verb (Otero 2013), a phenomenon frequently attested in the Iron Age Anatolian corpus, which appears to preserve its earliest occurrences; in three instances from Karatepe, the infinitive absolute even takes pronominal suffixes, a possible instance of interference from Luwian. Taken together, these features, many of which are found almost uniquely in the Anatolian corpus, underscore the significance of the Anatolian Phoenician inscriptions for a fuller understanding of Phoenician grammar and its dialectal variation.

Vladimir Olivero studied Classics at the University of Milan and earned his PhD in Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on Ancient Hebrew linguistics, textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible, and also on Semitic languages and Assyriology. He has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Università per Stranieri di Siena, the University of Cambridge, the Hebrew University and the École Biblique of Jerusalem, and he has served as Preceptor in Classical Hebrew at Harvard University. He is currently Departmental Lecturer in Early Judaism and Christianity at Oxford, and he is co-editor of the critical edition of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible Critical Editions series. He is also working on a Textbook of Phoenician and a revised edition of the Ugaritic Grammar.