A new language has been discovered at a UNESCO World Heritage site being excavated in northern Turkey, officials announced. News release from the University of Wurzburg.
The area being excavated is Boğazköy Hattusa, once the capital of the Hittite Empire. The Hittites are one of the world’s oldest known civilizations and have the world’s oldest known Indo-European language. excavation According to the university, it has been going on at this location for more than 100 years. The excavation is being directed by the German Archaeological Institute. Archaeologists at the site have so far discovered “approximately 30,000 clay tablets with cuneiform writing,” according to a news release from the university.
The stone tablets have helped researchers understand the history, society, economy and religious traditions of civilizations, but this year’s excavation “brought some surprises,” the university said. Among the “religious ritual texts” written in Hitite, there are “recitations in a hitherto unknown language.”
“The Hittites had a unique interest in recording rituals in foreign languages,” Daniel Schwemer, the university’s director of ancient Near Eastern studies, said in a statement. This means that the findings are not completely unexpected. This seems to refer to the language of the region once called Kalashma, located on the northwestern edge of the Hittite civilization, where the Turkish towns of Bor and Gerede now exist.
The language is “still largely incomprehensible,” the news release said, and research is underway to further understand it.
This is the fourth such language found on the stone tablets. Previous researchers have discovered cuneiform texts that include writings in Luwian, Paranian, and Hattic languages. The first two languages are closely related to Hittite, while the third is different, the university said. The new language was discovered in a place where Palay was spoken, but researchers believe it shares “more characteristics” with Luwian. The relationship between languages will be studied by researchers.
These ritual texts were typically written by scribes of Hittite rulers and reflect a variety of Bronze Age traditions and languages, the university said.by Institute of Ancient Cultures, University of Chicagomaintain. Chicago Hittite Dictionary“A Comprehensive Bilingual Hittite-English Dictionary”, Learning Hittite will help you uncover how Western civilization began.
“Contrary to popular belief, modern Western civilization did not begin with the Greeks,” the institute said on its website. “The true cradle of our civilization was where we are now.” Middle East now. Many literary and artistic themes and motifs can be traced directly to that world. The Bible was embedded in ancient Near Eastern societies, and the earliest forms of what we call modern science were found in Babylon. Anatolia was a natural bridge between those eastern worlds and the Greco-Roman civilizations, with the Hittites and their later descendants living in the same region acting as intermediaries and transmitting ancient Near Eastern culture to the West. ”