Discovering a lost ancient language of the Middle East

Middle East i Archaeology His research reveals how a long-forgotten ancient civilization used the lost to promote multiculturalism and political stability. old language What was used?

This important discovery also sheds new light on how early empires functioned.

Excavations of the ruins of the ancient capital of the Hittite kingdom in Turkey have yielded remarkable evidence that all the civil departments functioning under the imperial government were wholly or partly devoted to the study of the religions of the people.

Evidence suggests that in the second century BC the rulers of Haiti asked their civil servants to record the religious rituals and other traditions of the people in their respective local languages ​​(in the Hittite script) so that these traditions could be transmitted to the empire. Can be preserved and incorporated into the most comprehensive multicultural religious system.

Current linguists have discovered that Haitian civil servants preserved and recorded the religious documents of at least five ethnic groups.

The latest example of this came just two months ago. This document was written in an unknown Middle Eastern language that had been forgotten for three thousand years.

This section contains related reference points (Related Nodes field).

Over the decades, the ruins of the ancient Haitian capital of Hattusa (now known as Bogazkoy), about 100 miles east of Ankara, the modern-day Turkish capital, yielded documents containing some 30,000 complete and broken clay tablets.

Most of the documents were written in Hittite, the main language of the empire, but Haitian government scribes also wrote about five percent of them in whole or in part in the languages ​​of the empire’s minority ethnic groups, including Luyan (present-day southeastern Anatolia). , included the Paliyan (parts of northwestern Anatolia), Hittite (central Anatolia) and Hurrian (Syria and northern Mesopotamia) peoples.

A recently discovered minority language, recorded by the scribes of imperial governments (previously unknown to modern scholars) has been named ‘Kalasmic’ because it seems to have belonged to these people. He was from a region called Kalasma on the north-western edge of the empire.

This discovery shows that even the most obscure languages ​​in the empire were recorded in written form, studied and preserved.

This has led to the discovery of other minor Middle Eastern languages ​​recorded on clay tablets by the Hittite Empire.

The discovery of the ancient inscriptions is part of a series of specifics that archaeologists are currently excavating in Bogazkoy.

The empire’s civil service scribes wrote all the manuscripts in a Hittite version of a pre-existing Mesopotamian script (the world’s oldest writing system) known as cuneiform, which consists of wedge-shaped lines and called them alphabets. are arranged in groups representing

This region of the Middle East, now part of present-day Turkey, was particularly rich in languages ​​in ancient times.

Linguistic diversity often depends on geography. The more mountainous and isolated valley civilizations there are, the more likely languages ​​are to develop and survive.

Only five Bronze Age minority languages ​​are currently associated with the Hittite Empire, but in fact, given the mountainous geography, it is estimated that there may be at least 30.

In fact, very close to the ancient Hittite Empire was the Caucasus mountain region which still boasts about 40 ancient languages.

The Hittite language is the oldest attested Indo-European language in the world.

The earliest inscriptions date back to the 16th century BC. As an Indo-European language it is related to most modern European languages ​​(including English) as well as many Asian languages ​​(including Iranian and many ancient Indian languages).

In fact, despite the gap of three thousand years, Old Haitian and modern English share dozens of words.

For example, like the English for water, in Haiti it was called ‘watar’ and ‘Duttar’ for daughter and wiyana for wine, card for heart and new. was called ‘newa’ for

The discovery of ancient texts at Bogazkoy will help linguists better understand the evolution of the Indo-European languages ​​of the Early Bronze Age, to which English is also distantly related.

The current excavations are led by Professor Andreas Schachner of the German Archaeological Institute in Istanbul, while linguists from the Universities of Würzburg and Istanbul are participating in the study of the inscriptions on the clay tablets.

Professor Daniel Schwimmer of the University of Würzburg, an expert on cuneiform script and who led the investigation of the newly discovered text, said: ‘The history of the Middle East in the Bronze Age is only partially understood and the discovery of additional documents from clay tablets. is helping the scholars to add substantially to this knowledge.’

Excavations at Bogazkoy are currently yielding 30 to 40 new cuneiform plaques or plaque fragments each year.

Bogazkoy (ancient Hattusa) is particularly important because, as the center of the Hittite Empire, which lasted from about 1650 BC to 1200 BC, it was the capital of one of the world’s first half-dozen great imperial political civilizations.

It is also one of the first civilizations in the world to produce an important document by civil services.

The Hittite Empire stretched from the Aegean Sea in the west to present-day northern Iraq and from the Black Sea in the north to Lebanon in the south.

This civilization fundamentally changed human history because its technological innovations (notably the invention of iron, the development of highly sophisticated horse-drawn chariots, and the introduction of civil service) led to the expansion of warfare and government. Helped to establish the longest empires of the time.

Ongoing archaeological research at Bogazkoy is shedding remarkable new light on how the system worked in Hittite civilization and how it helped shape human history.