ABSTRACT
As a baseline definition, Linguistic Landscape (henceforth LL) is any display of texts. LLs have been around for millennia. Hammurabi’s code of law was displayed on a stele for public view in Babylon about 3,770 years ago and graffiti was carved on exterior walls in Pompeii some 2,100 years ago. These texts were part of ancient LLs and have been scrutinized by historians for a long time to understand and depict the societies that created them. Other early publicly displayed texts such as the Rosetta Stone, a stele with a bilingual text in three different scripts displayed more than 2,200 years ago in Egypt, and the trilingual Behistun Inscription, a text carved some 2,500 years ago in current Iran, have been of special interest to philologists and linguists. The former inscription was the key to decrypting Egyptian hieroglyphs and the latter to deciphering cuneiform script. In both cases, it was the presence of more than one language that made them especially noteworthy to scholars.
