Digital Hittite
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Cuneiforms: New digital tool for translating ancient texts, University of Würzburg, ScienceDaily (March 26, 2025)
Summary: Major milestone reached in digital Cuneiform studies: Researchers present an innovative tool that offers many new possibilities
We usually associate cuneiform (Classical Latin cuneus [“wedge”] + fōrma) with Sumerian and Akkadian, but this logo-syllabic script was actually used for many languages in the ancient world: Sumerian, Akkadian, Eblaite, Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian, Luwian, Urartian, Palaic, Aramaic, Old Persian. In this post, we focus on its use for writing Hittite, the first Indo-European language, as described in the article cited above.
The UNESCO World Heritage Site of Boğazköy-Hattuša is located in the north of Turkey. It was once the capital of the Hittite Empire, a great power in the late Bronze Age around 1650 to 1200 BC.
The cuneiform tablets discovered there and in other Hittite sites represent one of the largest groups of texts from the ancient Near East.
They include thousands of sources in Hittite, an early-attested Indo-European language, as well as numerous fragments in other Anatolian languages, alongside Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hurrian texts.
An innovative digital tool has been offering researchers and students online access to these historical sources since 2023: the Thesaurus Linguarum Hethaeorum Digitalis (TLHdig 0.1) which was launched on the Hethitologie-Portal Mainz platform (HPM). Ever since its initial launch, this thesaurus has become one of the digital tools that Hittitologists use every day, with more than 100,000 accesses per month.
Expansion of the Tool with Many New Options
This tool is now even more powerful: As TLHdig 0.2 it is comprising more than 98% of all published sources — approximately 22,000 XML text documents, many of which consist of multiple rejoined fragments.
Currently the corpus consists of almost 400,000 transliterated lines.
But that's not all: TLHdig 1.0, expected in late 2025, will offer complete coverage of all published texts.
Researchers can browse and search texts in transliteration or cuneiform and apply various filters for more complex queries.
TLHdig is embedded within the infrastructure of Hethitologie-Portal Mainz and is integrated with various digital catalogue tools, media databases, and text editions.
Online Pipeline for New Text Publications
TLHdig is a community research tool. In compiling the corpus, the TLHdig team has drawn on digital and analogue resources developed by several generations of Hittitologists, including digital text edition projects on Hethitologie-Portal Mainz and the contributions of many individual scholars.
As a collaborative tool, TLHdig features an online submission pipeline for scholars publishing new Hittite cuneiform texts.
Users can copy and paste their transliterations into the creator interface and follow the prompts to finalise their submissions.
Since there are nearly 25,000 Hittite cuneiform tablets known to exist, the digitalization of catalogs, data bases, and texts will greatly enhance their study.
Selected readings
- "A new Indo-European language" (9/26/23)
- "Sally Rooney bucket hat; Hittite, Ugaritic, and the alphabet" (1/7/22)
- "The dissemination of iron and the spread of languages" (11/5/20)
- "PIE *gene- *gwen-" (8/10/23)
[h.t. Ted McClure]
Cervantes said,
March 31, 2025 @ 7:18 am
I don't think you meant to write that Hittite was "the first Indo-European language." It was the oldest of which we have written records. By the time these records appear, Indo-European had diverged into many languages across Europe, South- and Southwest Asia.
Yves Rehbein said,
March 31, 2025 @ 8:09 am
@Cervantes I noticed that but the quoted text makes it clear enough.
I would prefer earliest, but that is within the definition of first. If we forego the superlative there has to be a paranthetical, e.g. about how interesting other languages also might be in the hope of finding any. A little exaggeration makes clear that that is not the subject right now.
Yves Rehbein said,
March 31, 2025 @ 8:33 am
… except for the non-negligible chance of finding one in Anatolian documents, as for "A new Indo-European language" in the selected readings.
If all else fails you can do the Trump and speak of being first-er, lol.
Cervantes said,
March 31, 2025 @ 9:18 am
Huh? How is "earliest" different from "first"? Either way, it definitively is not true, nor does the quoted text make it clear. Hittite was neither the first, nor the earliest, Indo-European language. There's no possible quibble about that.
Victor Mair said,
March 31, 2025 @ 9:34 am
"the first / earliest / oldest Indo-European language" — context makes it clear that we're talking about languages for which we have written records; we don't know the names of any IE languages before that. This post is about writing.
Thanks, Yves.
No thanks, Cervantes.
David Marjanović said,
March 31, 2025 @ 10:13 am
We paleontologists go for "oldest known" automatically. Short and to the point.
Peter Grubtal said,
March 31, 2025 @ 11:31 am
David M.
with all due deference to palaeontologists, and at the risk of ultra-pedanticism : "oldest recorded".
Victor Mair said,
March 31, 2025 @ 6:40 pm
David, Peter,
Fair enough, and I was also thinking of "oldest attested".
Sean said,
March 31, 2025 @ 7:02 pm
I don't know of any Old Persian or Elamite texts written in the Sumero-Akkadian script, just in their own distinct cuneiform scripts. Many Old Persian and a few Elamite loanwords are attested in Akkadian texts but many English loanwords are attested in Japanese texts and nobody would say that Japanese characters were used to write English.
"The first Indo-European language" also sounds strange and misleading to me.
Hurrian Fan said,
March 31, 2025 @ 7:39 pm
"I don't know of any Old Persian or Elamite texts written in the Sumero-Akkadian script, just in their own distinct cuneiform scripts. Many Old Persian and a few Elamite loanwords are attested in Akkadian texts but many English loanwords are attested in Japanese texts and nobody would say that Japanese characters were used to write English."
Who said that Old Persian or Elamite were written in Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform? The original post just says they were written in "cuneiform", which is true. The entire comment section on this incredible new resource is wall-to-wall tedious nitpicking.
Victor Mair said,
March 31, 2025 @ 8:20 pm
Bless your soul, Hurrian Fan.
And I like your name very much.
Victor Mair said,
March 31, 2025 @ 8:28 pm
From Craig Melchert:
Yes, Daniel Schwemer assured me that the goal is to have transliterations of every Hittite fragment within a year to two. But there are a lot of fragments to be done, and it's clear that the quality of the transliterations and the grammatical tagging varies enormously. I've read some that show whoever did it has a very elementary control of cuneiform and of Hittite. Even editions by qualified people contain errors (including of course my own vanilla ones, where I keep finding errors, after using them for years). But it's a tricky business. You don't want to post any of this in a way that just anyone can "improve" them. And it's an enormous task for Schwemer and others in charge of the Portal and Konkordanz to keep up with submitted corrections, confirm that they are in fact legitimate corrections, and then go in and make them. Or in some cases simply record a different analysis without making a definitive choice.
Sean said,
March 31, 2025 @ 8:58 pm
Hurrian Fan: all the different cuneiform scripts, plural, are not "this logo-syllabic script," singular, which was used to write Akkadian, Sumerian, and Hittite. And if you don't want pedants, don't write in public about philology!
~flow said,
April 1, 2025 @ 3:24 am
Sean: "if you don't want pedants, don't write in public about philology!"
Very true, and all the more a fitting remark in a place that has been known for, shall we say, engaged discussions among knowledgeable people about fine points of wording.
I think its totally within the reach of even a short note concerning Hittite to avoid the impression that "Hittite is the first IE language" in history. "( First / oldest ) ( attested / recorded / written / known from archaeological records so far )" are a number of short and precise ways to avoid a misleading characterization without becoming ultra-pedantic.
Second the remark on cuneiform (also by Sean) to the effect that Elamite and Old Persian were not written in "the Sumero-Akkadian script, just in their own distinct cuneiform scripts", got countered by Hurrian Fan saying "The original post just says they were written in "cuneiform", which is true. […] tedious nitpicking".
Well let me tediously nitpick some more. The OP says, literally: "We usually associate cuneiform […] with Sumerian and Akkadian, but **this logo-syllabic script** was actually used for many languages in the ancient world: […] Elamite, Hittite, […] Old Persian" (my emphasis).
This very definitely asserts that, paraphrasing, cuneiform was used to write both Sumerian and Akkadian; Sumerian and Akkadian are the best known examples for using cuneiform; Sumerian and Akkadian used a logo-syllabic script; finally "this logo-syllabic script"—i.e. Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform—was also used to write, among others, Elamite and Old Persian.