An extinct Indo-European language primarily of the western and southern part of ancient Asia Minor of the 2nd and 1st millennia BC, especially important to Arzawa. It was closely related to Hittite, Palaic, and Lydian and was a forerunner of the Lycian language. Knowledge of Luwian comes from cuneiform tablets discovered in the ruins of the Hittite archives at Bogazköy (modern Turkey). The pioneering work on Cuneiform Luwian was done by Emil Forrer in 1922. In addition to Luwian passages in the cuneiform tablets, a number of inscriptions occur in a hieroglyphic system of writing that originated with the early Hittite stamp seals of the 17th and 18th centuries BC. Hieroglyphic Luwian (often called Hieroglyphic Hittite) texts have been found dating from as late as the last quarter of the 8th century BC. The language was deciphered in the 1930s. More was learned about the meaning of the writing after the discovery of the Karatepe bilingual inscriptions, written in both Hieroglyphic Luwian and Phoenician. The Lycian language of about 600-200 BC, written in an alphabetic script, is believed to be descended from a West Luwian dialect. Luwian was probably the language of the Trojans during Trojan War. The language survived in southwest Turkey until the Roman period.