It is thought that the Hittites spoke an Indo-European language, probably brought to Anatolia by waves of Indo-European settlers toward the end of the third millennium BCE. The Indo-European languages were derived from Sanskrit, an ancient Indian language, and were to become the basis of Greek and Latin, giving rise to all the modern European languages. Several ancient Hittite words bear a remarkable resemblance to their present-day English equivalents. For example, the Hittite word for “daughter” was dohter, while “water” was watar.
The Hittites used two writing systems—hieroglyphs (picture writing) and the wedge-shaped signs of the cuneiform script. The hieroglyphic script consisted of signs representing certain ideas, such as king, city, and god, together with other signs representing sounds. The lines of script were read
Cuneiform tablets such as this were used to keep records of transactions as well as to record history. Thousands of Hittite tablets have been found.
Alternately from right to left and from left to right, in the same way that a plow makes furrows in the earth.
When the city of Hattushash was excavated in the early 20th century CE, around 20,000 clay tablets of cuneiform writing were found. Historians believe the tablets, which were written in both Akkadian (the international language of diplomacy at the time) and Hittite itself, make up the royal archives. In the years immediately following the tablets’ discovery, the Czech scholar Bedrich Hrozny succeeded in deciphering the cuneiform texts, making the Hittite language accessible to modern scholars. He also revealed a history of the Hittite civilization that had been lost for more than 3,000 years.
See also:
The Assyrians (page 102) • Egypt’s Middle Kingdom (page 14)
World History
