Script - Lycian

Lycian is an ancient script used in Lycia, a region in southwestern Anatolia (modern Turkey), primarily between the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. It is an alphabetic writing system derived from the Greek alphabet, with additional letters for sounds unique to the Lycian language. The script encodes around 29 characters, including vowels and consonants, and is written left to right. It was used for inscriptions on stone, coinage, and funerary monuments, with notable examples found at sites like Xanthos. The Lycian script eventually fell out of use as the region became Hellenized, and its decipherment in the 19th century relied on bilingual texts, particularly the Xanthian trilingual inscription. In digital text processing, each Lycian character is assigned its own unique code point, enabling accurate representation and preservation of this historical writing system in modern computing environments.