At the end of the Bronze Age, between 1650 and 1200 BC. In the 4th century BC, central Anatolia was the capital of one of the greatest powers of the time in Western Asia: Hattusa, the Hittite kingdom.
Excavations carried out over a century under the direction of the German Archaeological Institute at the Boğazkale-Hattuša site – named after the current village nearby in northern Turkey – have already discovered almost 30,000 clay tablets with cuneiform writing.
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30,000 clay tablets for a better understanding of the Hittites
They include treaties and state resolutions as well as ritual incantation prayers and represent the most important source of knowledge for historians about the Hittite civilization. And by extension to its neighbors in the Middle East, since the kingdom had political importance at its height – it was still subject to the great pharaohs Egypt, like the famous Ramses II.
Therefore, if these tablets, which are on the UNESCO World Heritage List, are inscribed in the cuneiform system, they are written primarily in Hittite-Nesian, the oldest recorded Indo-European language. Certain texts attesting to the diverse heritage of the Hittites were also written in Akkadian, Hurrian, Hatti, Luwite, Palaitic… or even an unknown language.
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This was the surprise of the recent research carried out in Boğazkale-Hattuša this year: hidden in a ritual text in Hittite, a recitation written in a previously unknown Indo-European language was recently revealed to the eyes of researchers, they explain in a press release of the Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg (Germany), published on September 21, 2023.
An unknown language spoken in the land of Kalašma
The words discovered on a tablet are currently completely incomprehensible. However, the Hittite-Nesian text into which they are integrated remains fully readable by specialists – Hittite was deciphered in 1915 by the Czechoslovak linguist Bedřich Hrozný.
It is particularly understandable for Professor Daniel Schwemer, head of the Chair of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the German University, who deals with the cuneiform finds from the excavations in Boğazkale-Hattuša.
According to him, the Hittite excerpt mentions the new idiom as the language of the land of Kalašma, which lies at the northwestern end of the central region of the kingdom, probably in the areas of the present-day Turkish cities of Bolu or Gerede.
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Her colleague Professor Elisabeth Rieken, a specialist in Anatolian languages at Philipps University in Marburg (Germany), confirmed that it could indeed be integrated into the Anatolian-Indo-European languages spoken in the region in the 2nd and 1st millennia BC. were spoken.
His analysis also appears to show that this very secret idiom has more in common with Luwian, the language that may have been spoken in historic Troy – the Bronze Age palace city, rather than the legendary language of the Greeks.
However, its geographical proximity is more consistent with the Palaite language area, spoken by the Pala northwest of the central Hittite area. The relationship between the Kalašma language and the other Luwian dialects closely related to Hittite therefore needs to be studied in more detail.
Rituals of their neighbors, preserved in their archives
While the discovery of a new language in these archives remains extremely fascinating, it is not entirely unexpected, as Daniel Schwemer explains in the press release: “The Hittites were particularly interested in recording rituals in foreign languages.”
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In fact, the Hittite king’s scribes recorded traces of their neighbors’ cult traditions on their clay tablets. The site’s cuneiform texts (and sometimes even hieroglyphic texts) therefore contain passages in other Anatolian-Indo-European languages and provide an overview of the cultural landscape of ancient Anatolia. The language of Kalašma can be added to this list.
On the other hand, the “bilingual” excerpts are generally fragmentary. One of the longest texts remains the one engraved in a this time non-Indo-European language, Hattic (or Hatti), which commemorates the mysterious deity Ziparwa (Catalogue of Hittite Texts, CTH 750).
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