The Discovery of the Hittites
Until the end of the 19th century, the Hittites were considered another ancient people who had once existed and then disappeared from the historical stage and fell into oblivion. Knowledge about them was mainly derived from the Bible, where their name is mentioned several times, as well as from records of neighboring nations. The oldest mention of the Hittite name is in a document of the Akkadian king Sargon I, who ruled around 2300 BC. Egyptian sources, on the other hand, speak of the famous Battle of Kadesh, in which the Egyptians, led by Ramesses II, fought against the Hittites in 1275 BC. Later, tablets were found that testify to a signed peace treaty between Egypt and the Hittites after what seems to have been an unresolved struggle for dominance in Syria and the Levant. In Egypt, there was also a record of the marriage of a Hittite princess to Ramesses II as a sign of reconciliation. There are also records of the swift Hittite conquest of Babylon, but their rule there was short-lived.
Interestingly, Greek ancient writers do not mention them at all, although the Hittites were one of the most powerful ancient civilizations of their time. The tablets mention a people in the west called Ahhiya(wa) (possible: Acheans). In a text known as the Tawagalawa Letter, written by an unnamed Hittite king from the 14th century BC, King Ahhiyawa is referred to, and it states that Millawanda (Miletus) is a Hittite vassal state. The Hittite culture coincides partly with the Minoan-Mycenaean culture.
In any case, due to the lack of any material evidence of their existence, they were not given much attention. It was only by chance discovery of the remains of an ancient city in the heart of Anatolia, near present-day Boghazkale, 150 kilometers east of Ankara, little by little revealing the Hittite story. A story that was preserved on more than 35,000 discovered clay tablets! It turned out to be the Hittite capital of Hattusa, founded by Hattusili I.
The texts discovered in Boghazkale and elsewhere in Anatolia, written by the Hittites and other Indo-European peoples (Luwians and Palaics) who settled in Asia Minor around the 3rd millennium BC. In the centuries before Christ, they opened a new chapter in the history of ancient civilizations.
The Hittites built an empire that lasted until 1225 BC, and it seems that they were determined by the migrations of the mysterious “Sea Peoples.”
These discoveries directed the gaze of researchers into the depths of the past from which the world of forgotten Hittites emerged, and the most important contribution to its understanding was deciphering the Hittite script and language.
Discovery of Hittite script
Swiss orientalist Johann Ludwig Burckhardt discovered, during his travels in Palestine and Syria between 1809 and 1817, an inscription with previously unknown hieroglyphs on the wall of a house in the Syrian town of Hamat. He mentioned this in his diary published in 1822, but it went unnoticed and forgotten for the next fifty years.
Traveling through Asia Minor in 1834, French archaeologist and world traveler Charles Felix Marie Texier, while searching for the ruins of the ancient Roman city of Tavium, completely unexpectedly… Accidentally, in the village of Boghazkale, he found the remains of Hattusa, convinced that it was Tavius. About a kilometer and a half away, he discovered a site called Yazilikaya, with a large number of reliefs carved into the rock, which would later turn out to be depictions of Hittite gods.
In 1879, the British orientalist Archibald Henry Sayce noticed that the inscriptions in Bogaz Koyu and Yazilikaya, as well as the previously known “Hamathite” inscriptions found in Syria, were written in the same script. A year later, in a lecture, he asserted that the inscriptions belonged to the Hittites, basing his claim not only on biblical data but also on recently discovered Egyptian and Assyrian sources that spoke of a powerful nation inhabiting the kingdom of Hatti.
His hypothesis received further confirmation seven years later, when the archive of the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten) was discovered in Tell el Amarna. From the documents found, it became clear that the Hittite kingdom enjoyed great prestige in the 2nd millennium BCE. In addition, numerous records indicated that the Hittite state was powerful and influential. Two Egyptian letters addressed to the ruler of the then unknown state of Arzawa have been found. They were written in an unknown language, but were already completely readable in cuneiform script. Norwegian orientalist Jorgen Alexander Knudtzon hypothesized in 1902 that this unknown language belongs to the Indo-European language group. However, since this hypothesis was not based on solid evidence, Knudtzon, pressured by numerous criticisms, gave up his theory. Ironically, Czech professor of Semitic studies and extraordinary linguist Bedrich Hrozny soon after incontrovertibly proved that Hittite belongs to the Indo-European languages.
Forgotten languages.
In Anatolia, in the area of present-day Turkey, during this period Anatolian languages were spoken, and the Anatolian branch is the first known branch of the Indo-European languages (19th century BC). These languages most likely separated from the Indo-European community before other language groups, and therefore do not have some of the characteristics of other Indo-European languages (three genders, dual number, etc.). The Anatolian languages are divided into two groups: Old Anatolian languages (Hittite, Palaic, Cuneiform Luwian, and Hieroglyphic Luwian) and Neo-Anatolian languages (Pisidian, Lycian A and B, Lydian, Sidetic, and Carian). The Old Anatolian languages were spoken in the 2nd millennium BC, and the Neo-Anatolian languages in the 1st millennium BC. The Neo-Anatolian languages disappeared during the Hellenistic period (3rd – 1st century BC).
The term “Hittite language” comes from the Bible, but it is actually incorrect because Hittite refers to the Hattians who lived in that area before the arrival of the Hittites, and they called their language Nesite (Hittite nešili, nešumnili), after their ancient capital Nesa (Kaneš).
Hittite is one of the oldest known Indo-European languages. It was in use from around 1600 BC to 1100 BC. There are some indications that Hittite and related languages were used both before and after this period.
As the Hittite Empire grew, their language became more widely spoken and influential. different ethnic and linguistic groups settled the kingdom, so there were multiple scripts in use within the empire. The following were utilized:
It wasn’t easy to be literate in the time of the Hittites!
The Hittite language is Indo-European.
Deciphering the Hittite language wasn’t difficult. It was written in the already well-known cuneiform script. Words were clearly separated from each other (which wasn’t the case with many ancient scripts), texts were full of Akkadian and Sumerian words, and Akkadian and Sumerian were already completely familiar languages.
A frequently cited sentence that finally proved that Hittite is an Indo-European language is:
“nu NINDA – an ezzateni watar – ma ekutteni”
The word NINDA is written with an ideogram, which means “bread” in Sumerian. As soon as it involves bread, Hrozny logically assumed that the next word could be a verb meaning “to eat,” and indeed, the Hittite ezz- resembles the Indo-European root *h1ed with the same meaning (Croatian jed – em, Latin edo, etc.). In addition, the verb “to eat” requires… With oneself accusative, and the Hittite “-an” closely resembled the Indo-European accusative ending “*-om” (Latin -um, Greek -ov). Also, the next word “watar” irresistibly reminded of the Indo-European *vodr – “water” and English water, and the verbs “ezzatteni” and “ekutteni” (for the next one it was obvious that it means “to drink”, considering that it comes after the word “water”) had the ending “-tteni” which could be linked to the Old Indian ending for the second person plural -thana. Therefore, the sentence reads: “You eat bread and drink water.”
Characteristics of writing and language
Hittite, therefore, was written using cuneiform script borrowed from the Akkadians. However, such writing was not at all simple. Cuneiform script is a syllabic script, which means that it does not record individual sounds, but syllables, for example, “ta”, “ka”, “kan”, “aš”, etc. In addition to signs for syllables, there were also ideograms and determinatives in Hittite. Ideograms represent a whole concept, and determinatives are signs that are not read, but were written by the Hittites in front of individual words to clarify their meaning. “In this case, she marked the word that follows more closely. Additional difficulties arise from the fact that one sign can be read as both a syllable and an ideogram, and it could also be a determinative. A classic example is a sign that can be read as the syllable ‘an’, then as an ideogram for the word ‘god’ (DINGIR), and as the determinative DINGIR with the name of a specific god. Although the ideogram itself represents the whole concept, a grammatical ending was added to it in cuneiform script, as seen in the case of the word NINDA-an, where the ideogram for ‘bread’ was followed by the cuneiform sign -an as the accusative singular ending. Furthermore, cuneiform script was not suitable for the phonological system of the Hittite language, which, as an Indo-European language, was rich in syllables with a consonant-vowel-consonant pattern. Therefore, the discovery of the bilingual inscription (Hittite and Phoenician) at Karatepe in 1946 helped unravel the Hittite hieroglyphs completely. This inscription is currently the longest discovered text written in Hittite hieroglyphs.” One interesting aspect of Indo-European languages is that they lack certain characteristics found in some ancient Indo-European languages such as Lithuanian, Sanskrit, and Greek. Specifically, in the Hittite language, there are only two genders: common gender and neuter gender. Hittite has the following cases: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, directive or allative, dative/locative, instrumental, and ablative. Hittite does not have a dual number. Furthermore, it preserves some archaisms that are not present in other Indo-European languages. Hittite retains two out of three laryngeals – throat sounds (denoted as h2 and h3). These sounds do not exist in any other Indo-European language.
Based on these specificities of the Hittite language, scientists today believe that Anatolian languages were the first branch to separate from the “tree” of Indo-European languages.
Important monuments of the Hittite language:
“May you be well,
sun god of the heavens!
You can see into the hearts of all,
but no one can see into your heart.”
“If someone has committed a crime,
you are the one to judge.” Oh, dear heavens,
sunny god of the sky.
I walk the straight path,
and even if someone offends me,
you have seen it,
sunny god of the sky!
The multitude of discovered clay tablets are merely fragments of Hittite culture that take us back to a distant time and reveal a faraway, yet so familiar human being.