Indo-European, Anatolian · Cuneiform
Hittite
𒉈𒅆𒇷 nešili, “in the language of Neša”
- Spoken
- c. 1700–1180 BC
- Where
- Central Anatolia, today Turkey
In 1915 the Czech scholar Bedřich Hrozný stared at a clay tablet from Hattusa and recognised two words: a Sumerian sign for bread, and something that looked a lot like 'water'. From that sentence he argued that the Hittites, rulers of a Bronze Age superpower, spoke a language related to Greek, Latin and English. He was right. Hittite is now the oldest recorded Indo-European language, and it changed how linguists picture that family's ancestor.
Where and when
The Hittite kingdom was centred on Hattusa, near the modern village of Boğazkale, in the high plateau of central Anatolia. At its height in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC it reached from the Aegean coast to northern Syria and fought Egypt to a standstill at Kadesh around 1274 BC.
The Hittites called their language nešili, after the city of Neša (Kanesh), where Assyrian merchants had already recorded Hittite personal names around 1900 BC. The texts from Hattusa, some 30,000 tablets and fragments, include laws, treaties, prayers, rituals and one of the oldest surviving peace treaties, made with Egypt. Most of them were dug up between 1906 and 1912.
How it fell silent
Around 1180 BC, during the wider collapse of Bronze Age civilisations around the eastern Mediterranean, Hattusa was abandoned and burned. The causes are debated: drought, famine, internal revolt, raids by the Kaska people from the north and the disruption of trade all probably played a part. With the capital went the royal archives and the scribal schools that wrote Hittite.
The spoken language may have lasted a little longer in scattered communities, but it left no further texts. Its close relatives fared better: Luwian survived in the Neo-Hittite states of southern Anatolia and Syria until about 700 BC, and later Anatolian languages such as Lycian and Lydian lasted into the Greek era. Hittite itself disappeared until archaeologists began digging at Boğazkale in 1906.
How it may have sounded
-
nu NINDA-an ezzatteni wātar-ma ekutteni
Say it roughly noo NIN-da-an ets-at-TEH-nee WAH-tar-ma eh-koot-TEH-nee
“Now you will eat bread and drink water.”
Hrozný's key sentence of 1915; NINDA is a Sumerian word-sign for bread, so the Hittite word it stands for is hidden from us, and the z is usually read as ts.
-
𒉿𒀀𒋻
wa-a-tar
Say it roughly WAH-tar/waːtar/
“water”
The doubled vowel in the spelling wa-a probably marks length or stress; the word is a direct cousin of English water and Greek hydōr.
Your name, set in stone
Hittite scribes used Babylonian cuneiform, so names are cut into CV and VC syllable signs. E and i often share signs, o turns into u, and a consonant left without a vowel gets an echo vowel or a VC sign.
A playful transcription, not a scholarly one: the people who used this script never heard your name, and would have spelled it in more than one way.
Three things
- Hittite ḫ confirmed sounds that Ferdinand de Saussure had predicted for Proto-Indo-European decades before Hittite was read.
- A copy of the Egyptian-Hittite peace treaty of c. 1259 BC hangs as a replica in the United Nations building in New York.
- Hittite scribes mixed three languages on one line: Sumerian word-signs, Akkadian words and Hittite endings.