Anatolian Shepherd the transhumance, guarding flocks of sheep from wolves and cheetahs. It is probable that dogs of this type existed 6,000 years ago in what is now Turkey. Anatolian Shepherd Dogs are members of a very old breed, probably descended from powerful hunting dogs from Mesopotamia. This mountain dog breed was developed over time to meet a specific set of circumstances. The most formative were climate (very hot, dry summers and very cold winters), lifestyle (sedentary, semi-nomadic and nomadic) and duties (guarding flocks moving great distances on the Central Anatolian Plateau). In the 1970s, breeders in the West became interested in
Anatolian hieroglyphs aged some 700 years, was marginalized by competing alphabetic scripts and fell into oblivion. While almost all the preserved texts employing Anatolian hieroglyphs are written in the Luwian language, some features of the script suggest its earliest development within a bilingual Hittite-Luwian environment. For example, the sign which has the form of a "taking" or "grasping" hand has the value /ta/, which is precisely the Hittite word ta-/da- "to take," in contrast with the Luwian cognate of the same meaning which is la-. There was occasionally some use of Anatolian hieroglyphs to write foreign material like Hurrian theonyms, or glosses