Hittite royal archive found in Turkey

384 pointsposted 3 days ago
by benbreen
(thehistoryblog.com)

105 Comments

schleck8

3 days ago

The Hittites were one of the largest empires in the ancient world, but up until the last two centuries, the only proper documentation of them was in the Bible, which is why many historians suspected that they were a fictional civilization.

In 1834, French archaelogist Texier found the ruins of their capital Hattusa in modern day Turkey. But he assumed it was Pteria, a city mentioned in ancient Greek documents.

It took another ~ 70 years for German archaelogist Winckler to realize that this was the Hittite capital, based on clay tablets.

wl

3 days ago

The Bible is not proper documentation of the Hittites. All the texts that mention the Hittites post-date the fall of the empire based out of Ḫattuša by centuries. It's an open question whether the Hittites of the Bible refer to Ḫattuša or "Neo-Hittites" better described as Luwian-Aramean.

schleck8

3 days ago

> All the texts that mention the Hittites post-date the fall of the empire based out of Ḫattuša by centuries

I don't see how this would invalidate the legitimacy of the documentation. The Hittites were large enough to be visible to contemporary historians and scriptures were used for information preserval. Even if our knowledge was only preserved through written documents, we'd have a good grasp of history 300 years ago, especially of major societies. People weren't primitive back then, they even had state archives with historical records which the Bible mentions in a few places for further reading.

wl

3 days ago

We're talking about a Levantine Iron Age text discussing Bronze Age peoples where civilization collapsed in the interim. In the case of Ḫattuša, the state archives were almost certainly unreadable by the time the Biblical texts were written, evidenced by the lack of any Hittite cuneiform texts being produced or copied in the Iron Age. Egypt and Mesopotamia maintained texts and the ability to read those texts across the collapse. The same cannot be said about Syria-Anatolia and the Levant.

That isn't to say that the Biblical texts can't reflect a memory passed on through oral tradition or knowledge from Mesopotamia and Egypt. But given that the geography of the Hittites of the Bible seems to line up more with the later "Neo-Hittite" Luwian-Arameans than Ḫattuša and that the Bible doesn't seem to be aware of the empire of Ḫattuša, the Biblical Hittites are probably not Ḫattuša.

JumpCrisscross

2 days ago

> 300 years ago

Try 500 to 700 years. (Hittites collapsed around 1200 BC, the Old Testament was penned between the 700s and 500s BC.)

adrian_b

2 days ago

That is right but nonetheless the Old Testament includes material that was heavily edited and modified (to match both the conception of the editors about what is sinful and what is not, and also the political propaganda that was mandatory, i.e. that the Persians are the good guys while the Egyptians are the bad guys), whose origin was in much older stories, older by centuries and even millennia, e.g. the Gilgamesh Epic and other Babylonian literary works.

So some references from the Old Testament may correspond to people or places from many centuries earlier than the time when it was assembled, similarly to works like the Iliad and the Odyssey.

nautikos2

3 days ago

This is not correct because we don't know what the Hittites called themselves. This civilization, when it was found, was named after the Biblical tribe. There is no relation established between the two.

adrian_b

2 days ago

We know how they called their own language: "nešili", while they called "hattili" the language of the previous Non-Indo-European inhabitants of the place where the capital of the Hittite Empire was located. The "hattili" language does not have any certain affinities with other known languages, but it has some resemblances with certain North-Caucasian languages.

So the Hittites would better be called something like "Nessites".

Thus our name comes actually from the name of the people conquered by them (Hatti).

While the Hittites were originally identified with the people mentioned in the Bible, it is also possible that some or all of the references from the Bible are not to what we call Hittites, but to some "Hatti" people.

The Bible does not refer to the Hittite Empire but only to some people of Hittite origin that are encountered in the present territory of Israel, so they could have very well been of Hatti origin.

flowerthoughts

3 days ago

> This year’s excavation unearthed 131 cuneiform tablets and fragments which record an epidemic of fever, military logistics, religious practices and events of royal daily life 3,400 years ago.

Nice time machine you've got there. Not just vases and bones, but thoughts and societal complexities.

wl

3 days ago

My Hittite language class went online during COVID and switched from studying royal annals to the Plague Prayers of Muršili II. One of the most enlightening parts of studying the ancient world is seeing that even in very alien cultures separated by millennia, we're all just people.

pfdietz

3 days ago

In the case of the Assyrian rulers, really terrible people.

BigTTYGothGF

3 days ago

Well yeah, they were kings.

pfdietz

3 days ago

They come across as evil even compared to other kings.

MomsAVoxell

2 days ago

Why, in particular?

pfdietz

2 days ago

Skinning defeated enemies alive, for example, and celebrating that in pictures on victory stellae/carvings.

They made a lot of enemies who finally, when the empire was weakened by internal troubles, ganged together to destroy it.

sherr

3 days ago

The History Blog is a small gem because it is serious and not sensational. Always with a good level of detail for the average interested visitor, and from the original (or close by) sources. Plus pictures.

pluc

3 days ago

And they support RSS! Albeit through WordPress but nobody's perfect

jagged-chisel

3 days ago

RSS is RSS. Does it matter to a client how it’s generated?

tyromaniac

3 days ago

Depends how snooty and insufferable the client is :p

alsetmusic

3 days ago

I wouldn’t have thought to check, so I greatly appreciate you mentioning this. Added to my feed in the category (literally) Nerd Blogs. I love history, so you’ve made my day.

ekjhgkejhgk

3 days ago

What's wrong with WordPress?

pluc

3 days ago

How much time you got?

alsetmusic

3 days ago

Its CEO acts like a child and is abusive towards other orgs.

Matl

3 days ago

> CEO acts like a child

Applies to most of them.

20after4

3 days ago

It may be easier to answer what isn't wrong with it. Actually no, I can't think of anything that's right with it.

simonh

3 days ago

We have some copies of royal correspondence found in Egypt, written on cuneiform tablets. They used them for messages to foreign kings because they're compact and durable. A lot of the surviving tablets are begging letters asking the Egyptians for gold. We even have some practice tablets from teaching Egyptian scribes to do this.

Anyway I think some of these documents are of communications with Hittite kings, so it would be great to get some instances of the "other side" of some of these letters.

wl

3 days ago

That would be Amarna Letters 41-44.

A quotation from a letter sent by Ankhesenamun, Tutankhamun's widow, to Hittite king Šuppiluliuma I was found in Ḫattuša. Ankhesenamun asked Šuppiluliuma to send her one of her sons to marry her and become king of Egypt. Šuppiluliuma initially thinks this is a ruse, but the story eventually checks out and Šuppiluliuma sends a son. That son is killed on his journey and a war between Egypt and Ḫattuša ensues.

palmotea

3 days ago

> A lot of the surviving tablets are begging letters asking the Egyptians for gold. We even have some practice tablets from teaching Egyptian scribes to do this.

I'm imagining a class on "begging for gold" being given to young Egyptian scribes.

vegnus

3 days ago

This is such incredible news! I was just wondering the other day if we are ever going to find more Bronze age writings. Such an endlessly fascinating time period

timcobb

3 days ago

What about it?

vegnus

3 days ago

I always found the Jaynes' Bicameral Mind theory interesting, hypothesizing essentially Bronze age peoples did not have conscious thought, but attributed their thoughts to gods speaking to them. It's probably not true, but it's kind of like an era that can only exist through mythology and legend. So when actual details are discovered, and a little bit of the darkness is lifted, I always find it interesting

pfdietz

3 days ago

I always found it completely implausible, even outright ridiculous.

displayingnames

3 days ago

Ong casts Jaynes as misunderstanding the oral-literate divide, which seems to me to be far more compelling.

mcswell

3 days ago

There are plenty of illiterate people (and unwritten languages) in the world today, and they're quite self-aware. So even on this re-reading, Jaynes is wrong.

MomsAVoxell

2 days ago

If we take literacy in this context to mean 'able to read and write and thus access history', then it should surely be understood that it is possible to be illiterate today while nevertheless 'osmosing' a lot of quasi-literate understanding of the world.

Whereas in the Bronze Age, they didn't have such devices as television, radio, cartoons, etc. - or at least, there was not as wide a distribution of illiterate-usable media among the illiterate then, as there are today.

mcswell

20 hours ago

True about the media, but I don't know what that has to do with the original post in this part of the thread, which was about Jaynes' "hypothesizing essentially Bronze age peoples did not have conscious thought."

vegnus

3 days ago

It certainly downplays the achievements of those olden daysers

Lumich

3 days ago

« hypothesizing essentially Bronze age peoples did not have conscious thought, but attributed their thoughts to gods speaking to them »

The Mesoamerican advanced Stone Age peoples who had an ongoing encounter with the Spaniards certainly did have conscious thought, despite their gods. Why would Bronze Age peoples have been different in that respect?

MomsAVoxell

2 days ago

I think it was not that they didn't have conscious thought, but that they had very few ways of describing that thought until there was an abundance of leisure and relative freedom.

I view this bicameral mind means of thinking, though, relatively banal - especially in the modern context where cultures are clashing over apparent willingness to consider each others consciousness, or not. I think there are plenty of examples of cultures in the modern era who deny each other conscious thought, even today, such that it justifies their wanton destruction.

The darkness lifting: I concur, it is always wonderful to gain insight into humans, past, through their own words. The interpretations of things over the aeons have put a distinct burl on the edges of our understanding; discoveries like this archive bring back the shine. The Hittites were real people, with normal human problems.

cwnyth

2 days ago

Jaynes' goes far beyond the Bronze Age, though. It's unfortunately a bit of claptrap. Read "A Man and His Ba" to see just how clearly Bronze Age man knew they had individual will.

timcobb

3 days ago

Thank you, yeah, it is very much a fascinating time.

Telaneo

3 days ago

Looking forward to seeing this expanding our understanding of the Hittite lexicon and its relationship with the rest of the Indo-European languages.

cmrdporcupine

3 days ago

It looks like this is fairly late in Hittite's evolution, though, 14th century BCE.

Clarity about relationship with the rest of PIE would definitely be enhanced by having a corpus from substantially earlier on.

einpoklum

3 days ago

What artifacts are we leaving which will allow people in 3400 years to get a glimpse of daily events in our lives?

Digital information and toner/ink on paper will not last nearly that long.

Maybe humans of this age should be curating some etching on stone or even more durable materials, to record some of our history for posterity?

wl

3 days ago

We've already seen this happen in the land of cuneiform. In the first millennium BCE, Akkadian cuneiform on tablets was replaced by Aramaic written on papyrus and vellum. The cuneiform survives in large quantity, the Aramaic barely at all. The Story of Aḥiqar, for example, comes from Mesopotamia and the only copy that survives in the original language somehow found its way to Elephantine in Egypt where the climate allowed it to (barely) survive. It puts Assyriologists in a weird position where there's plenty of textual documentation of earlier eras but far, far less in later eras. We're left with odd situations like the best documentation we have of Nebuchadnezzar II's reign coming from the Bible because the Bible got copied and the Babylonian texts that might provide a different emic perspective did not.

tourmalinetaco

3 days ago

That’s not really an “odd” situation, though. That’s kind of just how it goes. The culturally important texts like the Bible get copied and spread, but who cares about the government’s documentation? Literally no one, unfortunately. Preservation within the historical record is in large part a mix of media used and popularity; a popular text can afford to be written on less durable materials, but using those less durable materials for unpopular documents? And they’ll be lost over time.

wl

3 days ago

It is odd here because the surviving records are so much better when you go even a little bit further in the past. Compare Sennacherib's siege of Jerusalem under King Hezekiah a century or so earlier. We have Judah's side of things recorded in Isaiah, II Kings, and Chronicles. We have Sennacherib's side of things recorded in his royal annals. When Nebuchadnezzar II actually succeeded in conquering Jerusalem a century later, we just have the Bible.

jopsen

3 days ago

They can just ask you, you'll live on in the weights of the future models.

einpoklum

3 days ago

I try to avoid conversion with LLMs. But I suppose they can always crawl my HN comments.

mcswell

3 days ago

"The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to develop a contemporary version of the historic Rosetta Stone. Run by the Long Now Foundation, the project aims to create a survey and near-permanent archive of 1,500 languages that can enable comparative linguistic research and education and might help recover or revitalize lost languages in the future." --from the Wikipedia description of the Rosetta Project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Project

solyin

2 days ago

It's not quite that, but GitHub put a bunch of source code on ice for preservation.

> The GitHub Arctic Code Vault is a long-term data preservation project that stores open-source software code deep inside the Arctic World Archive in Svalbard, Norway.

https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/

b112

3 days ago

We have those CDs made of stone we could use! That's sorta a stone .. thing.

IAmBroom

3 days ago

The data is preserved in plastic, which is (so far) a less-digestible hydrocarbon than wood (paper) and skin (vellum).

So, intermediary at best. My understanding is that R/W CDs are far less durable than earlier write-once CDs, but probably far less common for mass storage.

b112

3 days ago

https://blog.hagerman.com/written-in-stone-m-disc-technology...

IAmBroom

2 days ago

Thank you! That is a great write-up!

In the early 1990s I worked for a CD foundry. We mostly made CD backups of nuclear plant records, and short runs of off-brand music. The resist dye got EVERYWHERE, because humans spill things; red blotches on everyone's work shoes.

If those "3 year" predictions meant anything, half of our business would have gone for tape backups.... Don't know if it's accurate, of course.

b112

2 days ago

No worries re: link.

And for predicting things, it's been a decade since I bought a computer with a disc reader of any sort.

I thought they'd last forever, decades anyhow, but I wonder now. What good are stone cds, if there are no readers in 50 years.

The CD foundry job must have had fun moments.

Isamu

3 days ago

I love that the comments on TFA include Unicode cuneiform, not images

jorblumesea

3 days ago

This is really interesting because there's an active debate around who Tudhaliya II actually is and how the records overlap with Tudhaliya I. hopefully this will shed more light on early early new Hittite kingdom chronology.

ajb

3 days ago

"Another notable document is a letter from Hittite generals in western Anatolia appealing to the king for reinforcements in men, horses and chariots to fend off enemy forces. "

I had assumed they had to wait for clay to dry before it could be carried anywhere, which seems incompatible with using them for urgent military messages. I wonder if there was a way to transport them while soft, or if this was just the archival copy of a message sent by other means.

ACS_Solver

3 days ago

Most tablets were air dried, which would take a day or two. But some tablets were fired - dried in a kiln. I don't know about Hittites but at least in Mesopotamia, air drying was by far the most common method and only some important ones were fired. So methods were certainly available to dry a tablet quickly if necessary but I doubt if air drying delays made much of a difference. Messages and goods were limited to the speed of horse after all.

popol12

2 days ago

Firing clay in a kiln also make it more water resistant, I believe

AnimalMuppet

3 days ago

It's not like they had to wait for the clay to dry, and then sent the message via email over fiber optic cable. It would take days to reach the palace. Drying it (maybe in a small kiln?) first was a small part of the delay.

samudrijan

3 days ago

Where do you think we get the expression clay pigeon? Earliest form of airmail…

Cthulhu_

2 days ago

Write it, keep it on a stabilizing platform and start running - the clay will be dried after a few days of travel. Of course there's a risk that the message will get smudged but I'm sure they had ways and means to stabilize the message before it arrived.

What I wonder about is whether these tablets as they are found today were just air dried or if they were fired at all. I can imagine that they would get fired for archival purposes in the capital.

doormatt

3 days ago

Are there any complaints about the quality of copper?

boo_you

3 days ago

this blog just restates the article it links

jagaerglad

3 days ago

[flagged]

usrnm

3 days ago

The languages aren't even related. Hittite is an Indo-European language, closer related to English than Turkish

logicchains

3 days ago

Kurdish is also Indo-European, but that doesn't stop Turks claiming it's just a dialect of Turkish (mountain Turkish).

mda

3 days ago

Apart from a few idiots nobody claims it is Turkish dialect.

There are some shared vocabulary, but thats pretty much it. Kurdish is much closer to Farsi.

BeetleB

3 days ago

> Apart from a few idiots nobody claims it is Turkish dialect.

Back in the 90's, it was not that hard to find Turkish people saying exactly this.

This was before most had the Internet, so they could say stuff and get away with it. The idea was to belittle the Kurds, and deny them their identity. Obviously, not serious scholarship.

TFNA

3 days ago

Instead of parsing "mountain Turkish" as "mountain+turkish", parse it as " mountain turk+ish". The use of the term "Mountain Turk" arose in the Atatürk era as a quick way to nip any discussions of those ethnic minorities in the bud. That is all the term serves for. It doesn't mean that Turks believe Kurds actually speak a language genetically related to their own.

Bayart

3 days ago

The current consensus is not that Hittite is Indo-European, it's that Anatolian languages (including Hittite) are related to Indo-European, both stemming from proto-Indo-Anatolian.

TFNA

3 days ago

I actually work in this field, so I can encourage you to do some further reading and get to grips with the terminology. "Indo-European" remains among experts the most popular way to refer to the entire language family, Anatolian and non-Anatolian. Terms like "Nuclear IE" and "Core IE" are often employed to distinguish the non-Anatolian languages.

"Indo-Anatolian" for the higher-level family is a term that some may use here and there, but no expert would ever make a "well, acktually..." remark as you just did to those in a discussion, professional or layman, using "Indo-European"

Bayart

a day ago

Point taken. I'm a medievalist first and my interface with historical linguistics is Gallo-Romance languages, I'm just tracking the rest from afar. Call it a special interest. I've seen "Indo-Anatolian" pop up in literature, I was under the impression that it was the correct nomenclature at the moment.

In any case, my point was the early split of Anatolian and "the rest", however you want to call it.

cwnyth

3 days ago

It's not consensus (yet?), but Kloekhorst's categorization does put the Anatolian split first and early, making it essentially two separate branches of PIE. He isn't concerned about the terminology, but it does allow for alternatives, and "Proto-Indo-Hittite" is now a century-old term.

Despite the terms used, Anatolian and non-Anatolian languages are seen as two separate branches.

Maybe I'm being too charitable, but I hadn't read that user's comment as a "well, acktually", especially given the chain of comments, but perhaps I'm wrong.

TFNA

3 days ago

Everyone puts the Anatolian split first and early. It doesn't mean the use of the term "Indo-European" for the entire family, Anatolian included, is in any way superseded or unpopular among experts.

cwnyth

2 days ago

I agree, but that's why I said "Despite the terms used." I'm suggesting, moderately, that the user might be thinking of that split and how others have used alternative terms to better describe the situation.

Certainly, that Hittite broke off first is the consensus, and thus it makes sense (but isn't the consensus) that we should say something like "Indo-Hittite". BUT, one is a matter of describing history, and the other is an arbitrary label attached to that description.

Your "well akshually" was a nice way of softening the original poster's brief comment. I just don't think any of us truly disagree (barring that user's subsequent thoughts, of course).

wl

3 days ago

I don't think that's the consensus. Even if it were the consensus, the I doubt the people making the argument would disagree that the Anatolian languages are closely related to the Indo-European languages. The grammar is classic Indo-European, with 7-9 cases depending on the period. The vocabulary has a lot of cognates with Indo-European languages. The only things that really distinguish Hittite from Indo-European languages are the system of enclitics and grammatical gender based on animacy rather than the usual masculine/feminine/neuter.

DC-3

3 days ago

That's not the consensus and even if it were it's largely a pointless semantic argument.

user

3 days ago

[deleted]

m_a_g

3 days ago

This is not reddit

anthonyrstevens

3 days ago

Evergreen comment around here

user

3 days ago

[deleted]

01100011

3 days ago

> One text tells of a fever epidemic that struck the infant daughter of the king. She was still a nursing baby when she became ill. She never recovered from the fever and her health declined precipitously until she passed away.

Wow, the infant daughter was nursing a baby? Were the Hittites like aphids which can be pregnant while still in the womb?

As much as I hate AI slop, sometimes I think people are better off leaving writing to robots.

neil_naveen

3 days ago

The text says "a nursing baby," meaning the infant was being nursed, not that she was nursing a baby.

asveikau

3 days ago

Seems like a fault of your English language parsing ability. Though deliberately misinterpreting grammar as you've done is a common type of joke that I appreciate.