# Hittite



## dihydrogen monoxide

I would like to know why is the study of Hittite language a niche field. How come there are only few experts in this field and it hasn't reached mainstream linguistics yet. Even the study of religion, laws and mythology is not mainstream like Egyptian or some other semitic occurences. When the Hittite was discovered why did it stay only in such a small community and was only studied in a historical sense and was never studied as a living language.


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## pollohispanizado

It was never studied as a living language because it stopped being spoken after the 13 century BCE. It is really only important these days because it is (one of) the oldest attested language to branch off from PIE. There must have been dozens or hundreds of contemporary languages of equal linguistic importance in the study of PIE, but none (or not many) have the written evidence to work from. Egyptian studies are far more advanced and prevalent because their culture isn't as old, they kept extensive records of all aspects of their society, and they were a Roman province, and the Romans were even more assiduous chronicalists.


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## ahvalj

From what I understand, the primary reason is that the tablets belong to the institutions and scientists that collected them, so unless this institution and this scientist processes and publishes the findings, they remain practically inaccessible. The vast majority of tablets found have not been published so far and will probably not become available to the public in the foreseeable future… Plus, it all is excavated in Turkey.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

Unlike, Ancient Egyptian there is hardly talk of their culture in history books. There are numerous grammars on Latin, Ancient Greek and few on Hittite. Not studying it as a living language was meant as it is more studied through lense of what did it contribute to PIE and not in the same vein as Latin and Greek. They were mentioned in the Bible yet throughout the whole of history there was no one looking for them until 19th century. 

Yet how come Sumerian culture is mainstream, it was also excavated in Middle East.


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## fdb

I don't think you will find anyone studying comparative and historical Indo-European who does not give a lot of attention to Hittite and the other ancient Anatolian languages. It is as mainstream as it gets.


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## ahvalj

I don't have a detailed knowledge about the circumstances of excavations and subsequent fate of the excavated material. I have read that for example the Elamite studies were very seriously hampered by the inability of foreign researches to come to south-western Iran, do anything there (due to the hot climate and the hostility of the local population and the administration) and to get out the excavated material from the country. Present-day Iraq on the other hand was a dependent area around a century ago and such logistic problems were much less serious. Inland Turkey is in between: the country allowed excavations and then started to do them itself, but the current state of affairs is such that the majority of tablets remain unpublished. Besides, excavations are made by archeologists and work on tablets has to be done by linguists.

An important thing is that preparation of the tablets (which number tens of thousands) is extremely boring and time consuming, so a linguist should selflessly spend his life on technical things knowing that some Ph.D. student will come to properly study the published texts and take in much of the scientific harvest. That all can be resolved if special institutions with dedicated technical personnel are established, but who will do it? For Turks that is not quite part of their history as far as I imagine: they are not as hostile to it as to their Greek past, but not ardent either.

And yes, Hittite is not marginalized in the Indo-European studies. The main problem turns out to be the proper reading of the published tablets: as far as I have understood from Kloekhorst's works, very important is the correct dating that allows to establish what is characteristic of the older stage of Hittite and what are later developments (which was not taken quite seriously in most previous publications), plus the cuneiform orthography is very ambiguous and very much depends on correct understanding of the phonetic reality behind the syllabic signs (which of course remains controversial).


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## ahvalj

Some more things.

The biblical Hittites are not Hittite-speaking Hittites of the second millennium, but inhabitants of Neo-Hittite states. They even didn't speak Hittite. Historians didn't know about the existence of proper Hittites until the end of the 19th century. Classical Greeks didn't know either.

The introduction of Hittites into popular history is, I think, impossible without pictorial material: unlike with Egyptians and Mesopotamians, we have no idea how people and buildings and actually anything else looked. The Internet pictures of Hittites are therefore pure fantasies.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

Yes, Hittite is not marginalized in PIE studies, in fact it is considered as one of the significant languages. I know about the Hittites in the Bible not being Hittite, but it puzzles me that nobody until the 19th century went looking for them, yet they went so far as to try to prove the existence of fictitious characters.

Well, you would imagine how they looked if you can attach a face to the human skull, there are forensic artists that can do that. We don't know anything about their day to day life, if I remember correctly they never wrote down something like that. 

What I'd like to see is Hittite being introduced outside of PIE field. There are books about their culture, but a common man is much more acquainted or can at least have some knowledge about Ancient Egyptians and Greek and Latin. Yet when you mention Hittite, it sounds Greek to him.

It is also interesting the late date of the discovery of language.


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## ahvalj

But that's the fate of so many civilizations. Tartessos or Minoans were only remembered because Greeks wrote about them, and Etruscans because Romans were their contemporaries. Thracians were called second most numerous people after Indians, they had cities and state and art and oral tradition (Orpheus may have been Thracian), where is it now? We know the early history of Rome but there were tens of thousands of such early romes in the Mediterranean, each with its chronicles, heroes and tales, many with its own dialect. Virtually all is lost.

Concerning Hittites, I don't know if there are skulls clearly attributable to them: Hittites seem to have practiced cremation. There are some reliefs, but they are so stylized that I can't easily tell if e. g. this depicts Hittites or some Aztecs. There probably is some anthropological reality behind these faces, but who knows what exactly? After all, their contemporaries Mycenaeans are depicted as this while perhaps in the real life they looked somewhat less pinocchiesque…

P. S. By the way, the historical fate of Hittite is not that bad since the royal archive with those countless tablets has been discovered. But its sister language Luwian, which was geographically much more widespread (west, south and south-east Anatolia), eventually almost replaced Hittite as the everyday medium of the empire, survived for centuries in the Neo-Hittite states and was probably the ancestor of the later languages of the Luwic branch, remains much worse attested. The Minoan language in contrast is attested but not deciphered. The Mycenaean royal archive probably is lost. The capital of Mitanni is not discovered and the Indo-Aryan language spoken there by part of the elite is not attested directly.


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## Kevin Beach

ahvalj said:


> From what I understand, the primary reason is that the tablets belong to the institutions and scientists that collected them, so unless this institution and this scientist processes and publishes the findings, they remain practically inaccessible. The vast majority of tablets found have not been published so far and will probably not become available to the public in the foreseeable future… Plus, it all is excavated in Turkey.


That looks like the final scene in "Raiders of the Lost Ark", which implied that the U American government had decided to hide the rediscovered Ark of the Covenant in an anonymous warehouse. Was that your meaning?


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## ahvalj

I meant nothing sinister, it's just life ,) I meant that what enters the scientific circulation is just a minor share of the collected evidence: very much simply never reaches publication (first of all for the lack of time or interest, or because of rejection by the publisher), and of what gets published a huge percent does not attract lasting attention…

Finding anything in the scientific literature is often not much easier than finding anything in general media. Science badly needs an indexing and cataloguing system to account everything published in the last centuries. Perhaps the development of the artificial intelligence will help.

P. S. I have always perceived this "anonymous warehouse" as containing thousands of other such arks. And no, I didn't allude to the crimes of the US government, I alluded to the inability of the descriptive science to properly process its findings. Every scientific collection is full of such arks, which get forgotten and then quite often get lost during inheritance from owner to owner or during restructuring of the institutional structure.


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## Hulalessar

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> ...yet throughout the whole of history there was no one looking for them until 19th century.



Basically no one was looking for them as they did not know they were there until they were found. The reason they were unknown to ancient historians probably has to do with the Late Bronze Age Collapse in the Easter Mediterranean. The Greeks, for example, lost the art of writing. All they had was something like a folk memory of ancient conflicts, cf _The Iliad_.

I have no idea how many people are involved in studying the various ancient civilisations other than Roman and Greek. One would imagine that Egyptology is the most glamorous and attracts the most students and funding. Those who work in other fields cite underfunding as the reason for a lack of progress.

"Hulalessar" is a Hittite word - the only one I know. It just sounded nice. I think I may have been reading about the Hittites when I joined the forum.


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## ahvalj

I know what could spark the interest to Hittites and overall to this group. The latest attested Anatolian language is perhaps Isaurian. What if its or other Anatolian speakers survived in some villages to these days?


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## pollohispanizado

It's easy to look back and think that it's crazy that nobody bothered to "try to find" evidence of this language that tells us so much about PIE, but that's the nature of our existence: as I type this, dozens of languages of varying levels of "cultural importance" (obviously every language is important) are going extinct; and even in our age of technology, these are mostly unwritten, and having been taken over by a more dominant (likely a European IE...) language, they will be forgotten and never studied thence forth, sadly.


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## ahvalj

…As it was almost always in history. Ancient Greeks were interested in everything around them but the languages of surrounding barbarians. They even had no interest to languages of the nations they incorporated like Cretans, Leleges or Pelasgians.


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## pollohispanizado

Exactly. It's actually more incredible that we _do_ find this evidence.


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## danielstan

Regarding the Thracian (second-most numerous people after Indians, according to Herodotus) and their branch Dacians:
- 100+ years of arheology in Romania and Bulgaria (with some significant financing during the communist regime) resulted in the discovery of few inscriptions (Thracian inscriptions ,  Dacian inscriptions) , the longest one having 61 letters (Ezerovo ring).

These peoples simply did not have a written culture spread in their population, otherwise arheologists would have discovered something like Pompeii grafitti or other inscriptions made by common people on knives, swords, shields etc.
No monumental inscriptions were found in these countries showing the lack of interest from the state authority to publish propagandistic messages for their people.
There are ancient Roman and Greek sources reporting the use of writting for diplomatic reasons (treaties with Rome, embassies sent to other countries) from the Dacian kingdom, but these were cancellary documents circulating in a small circle of state functionaries (and written on paper or other degradable support)

I think there were many other peoples like these in antiquity.


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## ahvalj

But they had coins:


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## danielstan

Indeed, most of the Dacian-Thracian inscriptions were on coins and usually they contained only the name of the king.

In Dacian fortresses arheologists discovered some stones labeled with Greek letters (alfa, beta, gamma) and the purpose is easy to deduce: 
the architect labeled the stones before being put in the wall.

Nothing useful for discovering the vocabulary of such an ancient language - this was my point.


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## Roxxxannne

The more an ancient culture enters the popular imagination the more likely it will attract students and therefore scholars.  Sensational finds like the Rosetta Stone and Tutankhamen's tomb and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accessibility of tourist-friendly structures like the Parthenon, the Pantheon, and the pyramids helped also. In addition, there was no Renaissance that recovered (or 'uncovered') Hittite, Akkadian, and Sumerian, the way the European Renaissance was a rebirth for "classical antiquity."  And let us not forget the relationship of Latin and Greek to Christianity, the religion of Europe.

Also, for a 'dead language' to emerge from its niche, it needs to have been accessible to a lot of scholars (both geographically and through time).  Hittite has been widely known to be Indo-European for only about 100 years; that's only about three or four scholarly generations.   Also, about 50 years ago Hittite was studied in only a handful of universities in the US: mostly, as I recall, Yale, and the U. of Chicago; also UC Berkeley and, spottily, Brandeis (Hoffner taught there before he taught at Yale).  Maybe there were a few other places, like Penn, Harvard, and UCLA, but I don't recall.  On the other hand, there were at that time many, many colleges, universities, and seminaries  in the US where one could learn Latin and Greek.  Plus, a knowledge of Akkadian used to be helpful in learning Hittite (maybe it still is), and it also helped in the 1970s to know German, at least for me (the grammar book I used in grad school was _Hethitisches Elementarbuch _by J, Friedrich_).  _Those two 'bonus' languages that one had to acquire a smattering of along the way made it less likely that people were going to take Hittite for fun.     


_
_


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## ahvalj

I still think that many people with linguistic inclinations will find Hittite (and Luwian) very fun to study (especially provided this can become a lifetime job), but the wide audience potentially interested in the Hittite civilization will face — as I have written above — a major obstacle in that we have very little pictorial material: we simply don't know how the Hittites looked like. I don't expect many kids to become fascinated by the lists of deeds of kings without being able (for the lack of evidence) to imagine the scenery and its actors.

A rare example of an attributed Hittite bust — the great king Suppiluliumas I:






[Changed the accent in the beginning of the first phrase].


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## symposium

We really have no idea of what anybody really looked like, apart from Hollywood movies. Do we really think the Romans looked the way "Gladiator" portrayed them, or that Cleopatra looked like Elizabeth Taylor? If that is all it takes for anything to be relevant in the fields of research, we can really imagine the Hittites to look any way we like them.


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## ahvalj

Since I have only seen one single Hollywood movie on the topic (Kubrick's “Spartacus”) I am deprived even of this advantage. (By the way, Italians on the Internet always complain that American and British actors depicting Romans look too Anglo-Saxon). Yet, if one expects fascination of Egyptian or Mesopotamian or Greek or Roman level, as it was mentioned above, it will hardly emerge with the existing level of attestation of Hittite life. Yes, there will always be people studying such civilizations, but the competition will be much higher elsewhere, as it has always been.


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## ahvalj

danielstan said:


> Indeed, most of the Dacian-Thracian inscriptions were on coins and usually they contained only the name of the king.
> 
> In Dacian fortresses arheologists discovered some stones labeled with Greek letters (alfa, beta, gamma) and the purpose is easy to deduce:
> the architect labeled the stones before being put in the wall.
> 
> Nothing useful for discovering the vocabulary of such an ancient language - this was my point.


I've come across such an evidence by patriarch Photius I:


> Read an extended work, voluminous even, in fifteen books and five volumes. In this work, testimonies and quotations of entire books not only by Greek authors but also by Persian, Thracian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Chaldaean and Roman authors considered notable in each one of these countries are thrown pell-mell together.


Photius: Bibliotheca.  Codices 166-185 (selected)


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## fdb

Photius's claim to have used anything other than Greek or Roman authors needs to be taken with a very large pinch of salt.


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