A new Indo-European language

September 26, 2023 @ 3:47 am · Filed by under Classification, Language and archeology

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Many LL readers are familiar with the archeological site of Boğazköy-Hattusha in north-central Turkey, which was the capital of the Hittite Empire and the place where the Hittite Royal Archives (17th-13th c. BC) were discovered, making it the oldest historically attested Indo-European language (scattered Hittite words in Akkadian documents stretch back to the 20th c. BC).

"New Indo-European Language Discovered"

Presse- und Öffentlichkeitsarbeit der Uni Würzburg (09/21/2023)

"New Indo-European Language Discovered during Excavation in Turkey." PhysOrg, September 21, 2023

Includes an aerial photograph of the excavation site with the following caption:  "At this excavation site at the foot of Ambarlikaya in Boğazköy-Hattusha in Turkey, a cuneiform tablet with a previously unknown Indo-European language was discovered. (Image: Andreas Schachner / Deutsches Archäologisches Institut)"

An excavation in Turkey has brought to light an unknown Indo-European language. Professor Daniel Schwemer, an expert for the ancient near east from Würzburg, is involved in investigating the discovery.

The new language was discovered in the UNESCO World Heritage Site Boğazköy-Hattusha in north-central Turkey. This was once the capital of the Hittite Empire, one of the great powers of Western Asia during the Late Bronze Age (1650 to 1200 BC).

Excavations in Boğazköy-Hattusha have been going on for more than 100 years under the direction of the German Archaeological Institute. The site has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1986; almost 30,000 clay tablets with cuneiform writing have been found there so far. These tablets, which were included in the UNESCO World Documentary Heritage in 2001, provide rich information about the history, society, economy and religious traditions of the Hittites and their neighbours.

Yearly archaeological campaigns led by current site director Professor Andreas Schachner of the Istanbul Department of the German Archaeological Institute continue to add to the cuneiform finds. Most of the texts are written in Hittite, the oldest attested Indo-European language and the dominant language at the site. Yet the excavations of this year yielded a surprise. Hidden in a cultic ritual text written in Hittite is a recitation in a hitherto unknown language.

Hittites Were Interested in Foreign Languages

Professor Daniel Schwemer, head of the Chair of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Germany, is working on the cuneiform finds from the excavation. He reports that the Hittite ritual text refers to the new idiom as the language of the land of Kalašma. This is an area on the north-western edge of the Hittite heartland, probably in the area of present-day Bolu or Gerede.

The discovery of another language in the Boğazköy-Hattusha archives is not entirely unexpected, as Daniel Schwemer explains: "The Hittites were uniquely interested in recording rituals in foreign languages."

Such ritual texts, written by scribes of the Hittite king reflect various Anatolian, Syrian, and Mesopotamian traditions and linguistic milieus. The rituals provide valuable glimpses into the little known linguistic landscapes of Late Bronze Age Anatolia, where not just Hittite was spoken. Thus cuneiform texts from Boğazköy-Hattusha include passages in Luwian and Palaic, two other Anatolian-Indo-European languages closely related to Hittite, as well as Hattic, a non-Indo-European language. Now the language of Kalasma can be added to these.

More Precise Classification of the New Language is in Progress

Being written in a newly discovered language the Kalasmaic text is as yet largely incomprehensible. Daniel Schwemer’s colleague, Professor Elisabeth Rieken (Philipps-Universität Marburg), a specialist in ancient Anatolian languages, has confirmed that the idiom belongs to the family of Anatolian-Indo-European languages.

According to Rieken, despite its geographic proximity to the area where Palaic was spoken, the text seems to share more features with Luwian. How closely the language of Kalasma is related to the other Luwian dialects of Late Bronze Age Anatolia will be the subject of further investigation.

Sponsors

The work is taking place in Boğazköy-Hattusha as part of the general multidisciplinary research project funded by the German Archaeological Institute (DAI), the Thyssen Foundation, the GRH Foundation, the Volkswagen Foundation and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Colleagues from the DAI and the Universities of Istanbul, Würzburg and Marburg are working together on the documentation and interpretation of the Text.

Daniel Schwemer and Elisabeth Rieken are members of the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature. They jointly lead the long-term project "Das Corpus der hethitischen Festrituale" (The Corpus of Hittite Festive Rituals) with workplaces in Mainz, Marburg and Würzburg within the framework of the Academies Programme of the Federal Government and the Länder.

Additional information on the new discovery is found in Greek Reporter:

"New Indo-European Language Discovered in Ancient City of Hattusa"

By Philip Chrysopoulos

The article is prefaced by a photograph of the famous 14th c. BC Lion Gate in the southwest of Hatussa, which always reminds me of the pairs of lions guarding important buildings in China, and thence to the rest of the world.  How they travelled all the way from Anatolia to East Asia merits investigation.

An unknown Indo-European language found on a clay tablet inside a Hittite ritual text has been discovered during an excavation in Hattusa, the ancient capital of the Hittite Empire.

The Hittite Empire was one of the great powers of Western Asia during the Late Bronze Age (1650 to 1200 B.C.). The excavation was conducted in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Boazköy-Hattusha in modern-day Turkey.

…

The Hittites were Indo-European people who appeared in Anatolia at the beginning of the 2nd millennium B.C. and by 1340 B.C. they became a dominant power in the Middle East.

The Hittite Empire (c. 1400 B.C. – 1200 B.C.) was rich in metals, especially silver and iron. In the empire period the Hittites developed iron-working technology, helping to initiate the Iron Age in the region.

…

Ritual texts, written by scribes of the Hittite king reflect various Anatolian, Syrian, and Mesopotamian traditions and languages. The rituals provide valuable information on the languages of Late Bronze Age Anatolia.

The cuneiform texts from Boğazköy-Hattusha include passages in Luwian and Palaic, two other Indo-European languages closely related to Hittite, as well as Hattic, a non-Indo-European language.

Researchers study the newly-discovered Kalašma language, that can now be added to the above after they find a more precise classification.

Professor Elisabeth Rieken (Marburg University), a specialist in ancient Anatolian languages, has confirmed that the idiom belongs to the family of Anatolian-Indo-European languages.

According to Rieken, while the new language is close to the area where Palaic was spoken, the text seems to share more features with Luwian.

Kalašma is a fascinating and important new discovery.  As linguistic investigations continue, we can look forward to further ramifications of how it fits into the Indo-European language family. 

The same issue of Greek Reporter also has some other interesting stories (e.g., "The Ancient Greek General who Saved Athens from Persians" and "Antikythera Mechanism—the First Computer in the World") and several documentary videos, including one on the Hittite Empire and one on the Battle of Salamis (the first great naval battle in history).

 

Selected readings

[Thanks to Hiroshi Kumamoto, Edward M. McClure, and Thomas Lee Mair]

September 26, 2023 @ 3:47 am · Filed by under Classification, Language and archeology


16 Comments

  1. Jenny Chu said,

    September 26, 2023 @ 4:19 am

    This is fascinating! It also raises a question I'd never thought of: what is the first attestation we have of linguistics (or philology or whatever) as a discipline?

    This certainly would seem to be a contender.

  2. Victor Mair said,

    September 26, 2023 @ 4:42 am

    @Jenny Chu

    Thank you for your probing, insightful question.

  3. Oscar Jantti said,

    September 26, 2023 @ 5:44 am

    @Jenny Chu

    The first example of a linguist (rather than rhetoritician or grammarian) I can think of is the famous Sanskrit-language linguist Pāṇini who is believed to have lived around the 5th century BCE. His Aṣṭādhyāyī (roughly meaning 'eight chapters' IIRC) is the first derivational grammar that we are aware of.

    The Hittite context is different: the Hittites, whenever they conquered a land, would move the statues of the gods of the conquered people (the statues were believed to be vessels for the gods) to their capital. The Hittites boasted of their land being 'the land of a thousand gods'. The rituals for all of these foreign or semi-foreign gods were conducted in the language of their original worshippers – Hittite prayer or ritual manuals (which, in the press releases, is mentioned to be the case here) tend to follow a clear formula "The priest does XYZ, and then says, in the lanuage of Luwia [insert Luwian text]" etc. This is how we have surviving passages in e.g. Palaic, another Anatolian IE-language, or Hattic, the languages indigenous to the Hittite lands before their conquest. Also, lots of Luwian. I wouldn't describe it as 'interest' as much as 'religious pedantry', but it's a while since I studied Anatolian languages.

    Elisabeth Rieken, who is quoted in the press release, is a respected historical linguist with a specialism in Anatolian. According to the article she considers it to be an clearly Anatolian IE langauge related to Hittite, Palaic, and Luwian, although " despite its geographic proximity to the area where Palaic was spoken, the text seems to share more features with Luwian."

    We'll see how much we can get out of what is probably a small corpus – Palaic, which we also know only through ritual texts such as this, is still bit of a mystery due to the small corpus (although not as much as the Iron-Age Anatolian IE language Carian).

    Either way, very exciting times to be an Anatolianist (or, in my case, a former student of Anatolian) !

  4. John C Swindle said,

    September 26, 2023 @ 7:12 am

    The arrow of time is not fickle but can be confusing. The question of whether what has been discovered is the newest or oldest known Indo-European language may be related to that of why the past was before while the future lies before us.

  5. Victor Mair said,

    September 26, 2023 @ 11:33 am

    From Robert Drews:

    Yes, it's apparently for real. The good news is that, unlike in some cases, we will all get to see what it looks like by March or April.

  6. Victor Mair said,

    September 26, 2023 @ 3:22 pm

    From Donald Ringe:

    Thank you, this is really interesting. Elisabeth Rieken is one of the ranking experts in the field, and I trust her judgment.

  7. J.W. Brewer said,

    September 26, 2023 @ 5:05 pm

    One detail not included in these stories (although I suppose we will find out eventually) is how long or short the quoted text is, which seems pretty important to assessing how much we'll be able to learn from it. And of course, given that it's apparently a ritual/liturgical text, there could be a fair amount of internal repetition, further lessening the range of lexical and syntactic variety evidenced.

    I don't know how easy or hard it is to date tablets like these (from clues in their other content or the context in which they were found) more precisely than "somewhere in this multi-century period when the Hittites floruit in this location," but that would also be interesting to know if it's knowable.

  8. Lucas Christopoulos said,

    September 26, 2023 @ 7:58 pm

    @ Oscar Jantti

    Do you know the original source for this Hittite purification ritual for a defeated army? They sacrificied and cut a man in two and made the army pass between the two parts hung on each side of the city gates before the defeated army purified themselves in clean water?

  9. David Marjanović said,

    September 28, 2023 @ 1:25 pm

    I don't know how easy or hard it is to date tablets like these (from clues in their other content or the context in which they were found) more precisely than "somewhere in this multi-century period when the Hittites floruit in this location," but that would also be interesting to know if it's knowable.

    Paleography does make it possible to distinguish "Old", "Middle" and "New" periods, but I doubt that's more precise than the archeological context.

    Also, isn't the plural floruerunt?

    this Hittite purification ritual for a defeated army

    …On the one hand, the idea that a defeated army needs a religious purification ritual sounds very much like the Hittites. But human sacrifice? By the time a crown prince was assassinated on his way to marry the heiress to the Egyptian crown, they had abolished the death penalty even for murder.

  10. Yves Rehbein said,

    September 28, 2023 @ 2:51 pm

    @Lucas Christopoulos

    Please read Ian Rutherford (2020): Hittite Texts and Greek Religion, ch. 10 ("War Rituals"), p. 211

    > A number of Hittite military rituals were performed to purify the army
    when it returned from battle.

    It includes a translation of CTH 426.2 known as "Between the Pieces" Ritual from Hallo and Younger (eds.), The Context of Scripture 1.

    Not sure this is what you are looking for, but the working title sounds like it: "Lustrationsritual für eine geschlagene Truppe" F. Fuscagni (ed.), hethiter.net/: CTH 426.2 (Expl. A, 17.10.2016) https://www.hethport.uni-wuerzburg.de/txhet_besrit/exemplar.php?xst=CTH%20426.2&expl=A&lg=DE&ed=F.%20Fuscagni – See there for transcription.

  11. Lucas Christopoulos said,

    September 28, 2023 @ 4:06 pm

    @Yves Rehbein

    Thank you,
    Lucas

  12. Lucas Christopoulos said,

    September 28, 2023 @ 4:11 pm

    @Yves Rehbein
    Similar with the Macedonians. But they had replaced the human by a female dog, and it was for their own armies followed by a procession carrying the statues of the twelve gods.

  13. AG said,

    September 28, 2023 @ 8:24 pm

    Not because this is particularly illuminating on the topic of Hittite armies, but just to point out something coincidentally connected, I just read this in Robert Alter's note on Ch. 15 of Genesis:

    “8. how shall I know that I shall inherit it? In this instance, Abram’s doubt is to be assuaged by a formal pact. Covenants in which the two parties step between cloven animal parts are attested in various places in the ancient Near East as well as in Greece. The idea is that if either party violates the covenant, his fate will be like that of the cloven animals. The Hebrew idiom karat berit, literally “to cut a covenant” (as in verse 18), may derive from this legal ritual.”

    Excerpt From
    The Hebrew Bible: A Translation With Commentary
    Robert Alter
    https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
    This material may be protected by copyright.

  14. Lucas Christopoulos said,

    September 28, 2023 @ 9:49 pm

    @ AG
    Thank you. It seems as a common cleansing ritual in the Eastern Mediterranean area, Anatolia. Mostly old reminiscent practice of human sacrifices as happening in Past Minoan Crete (Peter Warren), and fewer with the Myceneans (Axel Persson). For human sacrifices in China see Huang, Z. Y. and D.S. Yatesyates, already from 5000-4000 BC.

  15. Lucas Christopoulos said,

    September 28, 2023 @ 11:19 pm

    From: Hittite Ritual at Sardis
    Noel Robertson. Apr. University of California Press 1982. pp.129-130.

    In a series of texts, animals victims are cut in two in order to purify those in need- a defeated army, or a traveler thwarted by a bird of ill omen-who must pass between the severed halves (KUB XVIII 28 IV 47; VBoT24 I 30, 37; Bo 2540/c 12; KUB XVII 17.10; KUB VII 54 II 20); at the minimum, the victims are a goat, small or grown, and a small dog; and sometimes also an ox, an enemy prisoner, and a small pig. When Xerxes purified his army at Sardis by the same means, using the eldest son of the richest man in Lydia (Hdt. 7.39.3), the inspiration was perhaps Lydian or Anatolian rather than Persian. At any rate, the choice of victims at Boghazkoy and at Sardis is in marked contrast to the Greek and Macedonian versions of the same rite, which always and only use a dog, no doubt because it was regarded, as Pausanias says of a puppy sacrifice on behalf of the Spartan ephebes (3.14.9), as "the most valiant of domestic animals." These purification texts virtually exhaust the references to live dogs as victims or instruments. The dog has only a small part, and not a very distinctive one, in Hittite ritual.

  16. Victor Mair said,

    October 13, 2023 @ 7:00 am

    From Jim Muhly:

    This is very interesting. Why do we have so many IE languages, all related to Hittite? The situation reminds me of all the regional dialects of Greek that developed in the decades after 1200 BC.

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