midaτa-

This lexeme is attested once in a poetic inscription found at the cemetery of Sardis and roughly datable to the 5^th or 4^th century BCE.

[I.Y.]

nom./acc. sg. n. (?)

midaτad

LW 13.4 (Sardis)

The general tendency in treating this form is viewing it as a derivative of the personal name Midas, following (Gusmani 1964a:164f.). While such a solution represents an obvious temptation from the phonological viewpoint and is compatible with the morphological structure of the form under discussion (see below), it has little to recommend itself from the semantic viewpoint. It remains quite unclear why the name of the Phrygian king Midas or its derivative should appear on a Lydian inscription from Achaemenid Sardis, which apparently belongs to the private sphere.

On a positive note, one can observe that midaτad apparently functions as the direct object of 1pl. verbal form cešwν. The previous line LW 13.3 also contains 1pl. verbal form išqašãnwν, which governs the direct object qiraad ‘property’. It appears that LW 13.4, which shares the subject with the previous clause, continues the topic of manipulation with property. Therefore, on general contextual grounds, one would expect that midaτad likewise refers to material possessions, whatever be its denotation. 

The only possible way to proceed further is to look for an etymology that would fit the above contextual restrictions. Here the best option seems to be the comparison with HLuw. /miyant(i)-/ ‘many’, attested in hieroglyphic transmission. If the stem midaτa- meant ‘many’ or ‘most’, it could refer to a large part of property mentioned in the previous clause. The morphological considerations (see below) make me tentatively prefer the second solution. The correspondence between HLuw. */miya-/ and Lyd. *mida- is, of course, regular (Melchert 1994b). For a different approach, see Sasseville 2021a:110.

[I.Y.]

This is an a-stem, apparently formed by adding the suffix -τa- to the base mida- (Gérard 2005a:87f., Sasseville 2017a:137 n. 13). Synchronically, the suffix -τa- is otherwise added to the nominal forms in Lydian (cf. wãna-τa-, arm-τa-), which could be seen as an argument in favor of the Midas connection. Historically, however, it is cognate with the Luwian suffix -zza-, which is frequently used for the formation of adjectives, possibly with comparative or superlative meaning (Yakubovich 2013b). The assumption that the same type of derivation was also deployed in Lydian would support the translation ‘most’, tentatively proposed above. Naturally, without additional synchronic evidence from Lydian, the superlative reading would remain hypothetical.

[I.Y.]