PHRYGIAN LANGUAGE

ancient Indo-European language of west-central Anatolia, preserved in two distinct sets of texts. The first, representing Old Phrygian, consists of mostly cultic inscriptions on stone in an alphabet related to that of Greek and dates from the 8th to 3rd centuries BCE. The second group, virtually all curse formulas appended to tomb inscriptions in Greek, is written in the Greek alphabet and dates from the 1st and 2nd centuries CE. Phrygian does not belong to the Anatolian group in the narrow sense (meaning the group of Hittite and related languages). It shares a notable number of features with Greek, but its dialectal position in Indo-European is an open question.