Forgotten, then found
The Hittites were not forgotten in the sense that nobody had ever heard of them. The Hebrew Bible mentions “Hittites” (the “sons of Heth”) living in Canaan, and Egyptian and Mesopotamian records name a powerful land called Hatti or Kheta. What was missing until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a proper idea of their kingdom: where its capital was, what language it spoke and how large its power had been. The recovery of the Hittites is largely a story of decipherment and excavation.
Early clues
In the 1800s Hittite history was mostly a matter of scattered references. In the 1870s and 1880s, scholars noticed unusual hieroglyphic inscriptions and rock-cut reliefs in Anatolia and northern Syria, for instance at Hamath, Carchemish and sites in central Turkey. The British scholar Archibald Sayce argued that these belonged to a once-great Hittite empire, and his view was widely debated at the time. The script, now known as Hieroglyphic Luwian, was not yet readable, and it later proved to be a different but related language to the one found at Hattusa.
A separate clue came from Egypt. Among the clay tablets found at Amarna in 1887, a pair of letters sent by the king of Arzawa, a state in western Anatolia, was written in cuneiform signs but in a language no one could identify. The Norwegian scholar Jorgen Knudtzon proposed in 1902 that this language was Indo-European. This was an insightful guess, but many specialists were unconvinced because the evidence was thin.
The Hattusa tablets
The decisive material came from the ruins at Bogazkoy in central Turkey, which had been noted by travellers as early as the 1830s. In 1906 the German scholar Hugo Winckler, working with Theodore Makridi of the Ottoman museum, began excavations there. They found thousands of clay tablets in cuneiform. Some were in Akkadian, the language of international diplomacy, which scholars could read. Many others were in a language that was not known.
Among the Akkadian texts was a version of the treaty between a Hittite king and the Egyptian king, matching the Egyptian record of the peace made after Kadesh. This confirmed that the ruins were the capital of the Hittite state, known to Egyptians as Kheta, and the site was identified as ancient Hattusa. The Akkadian texts therefore provided context for the unread tablets.
Hrozny’s breakthrough
The Czech scholar Bedrich Hrozny worked on the unknown language during the First World War, and in November 1915 he announced his conclusion in a lecture in Berlin, followed by a longer publication in 1917. He argued that the language was Indo-European, related to Latin, Greek, Sanskrit and English. His reading of one sentence became famous: a phrase that he translated as something like “you will eat bread and drink water.” He recognised the verb for eating as related to Latin edere and English eat, and the word for water as related to English water, in forms such as watar.
The method he used was ordinary comparative linguistics: matching sound patterns and grammatical endings, together with context from the Akkadian passages and from Sumerian signs used as word signs. The sign system itself was already understood, because it was ordinary Mesopotamian cuneiform writing, so the main challenge lay in understanding the language it recorded, not in reading the signs. His result was challenged at first, but further work by other scholars showed that the grammar and vocabulary fit, and the identification became accepted.
Why it mattered
Hittite proved to be the oldest attested Indo-European language, with written texts from about the seventeenth century BCE. This was a major discovery for linguists, since it pushed the written record of the family back by many centuries. In the 1920s, the Polish linguist Jerzy Kurylowicz showed that a Hittite consonant corresponded to a sound that Ferdinand de Saussure had proposed decades earlier, on theoretical grounds, for the reconstructed parent language. This is one of the best-known confirmations of a linguistic prediction by a later discovery. Linguists still debate how the Anatolian branch relates to the rest of the family.
The Anatolian family
Hittite is now recognised as one member of the Anatolian branch of Indo-European. Related languages include Luwian, which was written both in cuneiform and in hieroglyphs, and Palaic. Later first millennium languages of western Anatolia, such as Lycian, Lydian and Carian, are also regarded as Anatolian, though Lydian and Carian have a more complicated record.
Hieroglyphic Luwian remained undeciphered for several decades. The discovery of a bilingual inscription at Karatepe in southern Turkey in the 1940s, with text in Phoenician and Luwian, was a major step. Later work in the 1970s and afterward by a number of scholars corrected earlier readings, and is now the basis of the standard understanding. The process shows that decipherment is often gradual, much as in the story of the Rosetta Stone and the later cuneiform decipherment.
Continuing work
Excavations at Hattusa continue, and archives and finds have been added since 1906, including new tablets, seals and building complexes. The Hittite archive has made it possible to write the history of a Bronze Age state largely from its own records, and its rediscovery remains a standard example of how archaeology and linguistics can complement each other.