Carian alphabets
The Carian alphabets are a number of regional scripts used to write the Carian language of western Anatolia. They consisted of some 30 alphabetic letters, with several geographic variants in Caria and a homogeneous variant attested from the Nile delta, where Carian mercenaries fought for the Egyptian pharaohs. They were written left-to-right in Caria (apart from the Carian–Lydian city of Tralleis) and right-to-left in Egypt.
Carian
Carian was deciphered primarily through Egyptian–Carian bilingual tomb inscriptions, starting with John Ray in 1981; previously only a few sound values and the alphabetic nature of the script had been demonstrated. The readings of Ray and subsequent scholars were largely confirmed with a Carian–Greek bilingual inscription discovered in Kaunos in 1996, which for the first time verified personal names, but the identification of many letters remains provisional and debated, and a few are wholly unknown.
The Carian alphabet resembles the Greek alphabet, but the exact Greek variant from which it could have originated, has not yet been identified. The main reason for this is that some of the Greek letters have different sound values in Carian.[5] Two hypotheses have been suggested to explain this. The first is that the Greek letters were randomly attributed to phonetic values; though some letters retained their Greek value. The second proposed by Adiego (2007), is "that the Carian alphabet underwent a strong process of cursivisation, dramatically changing the form of many letters. At a certain point this graphic system underwent a change to 'capital' letters, for which the Greek capital letters were used as models - but now only from a formal point of view, disregarding their phonetic values (...).".[4]
Origin[edit]
The Carian scripts, which have a common origin, have long puzzled scholars. Most of the letters resemble letters of the Greek alphabet, but their sound values are generally unrelated to the values of the Greek letters. This is unusual among the alphabets of Asia Minor, which generally approximate the Greek alphabet fairly well, both in sound and shape, apart from sounds which had no equivalent in Greek. However, the Carian sound values are not completely disconnected: 𐊠 /a/ (Greek Α), 𐊫 /o/ (Greek Ο), 𐊰 /s/ (Greek Ϻ san), and 𐊲 /u/ (Greek Υ) are as close to Greek as any Anatolian alphabet, and 𐊷, which resembles Greek Β, has the similar sound /p/, which it shares with Greek-derived Lydian 𐤡.
Adiego (2007) therefore suggests that the original Carian script was adopted from cursive Greek, and that it was later restructured, perhaps for monumental inscription, by imitating the form of the most graphically similar Greek print letters without considering their phonetic values. Thus a /t/, which in its cursive form may have had a curved top, was modeled after Greek qoppa (Ϙ) rather than its ancestral tau (Τ) to become 𐊭. Carian /m/, from archaic Greek 𐌌, would have been simplified and was therefore closer in shape to Greek Ν than Μ when it was remodeled as 𐊪. Indeed, many of the regional variants of Carian letters parallel Greek variants: 𐊥 
are common graphic variants of digamma, 𐊨 ʘ of theta, 𐊬 Λ of both gamma and lambda, 𐌓 𐊯 𐌃 of rho, 𐊵 𐊜 of phi, 𐊴 𐊛 of chi, 𐊲 V of upsilon, and 𐋏 𐊺 parallel Η 𐌇 eta. This could also explain why one of the rarest letters, 𐊱, has the form of one of the most common Greek letters.[11] However, no such proto-Carian cursive script is attested, so these etymologies are speculative.
Further developments occurred within each script; in Kaunos, for example, it would seem that 𐊮 /š/ and 𐊭 /t/ both came to resemble a Latin P, and so were distinguished with an extra line in one: 𐌓 /t/, 𐊯 /š/.