Hittite royal archive found in Turkey
thehistoryblog.com
thehistoryblog.com
In 1834, French archaelogist Texier found the ruins of their capital Hattusa in modern day Turkey. But he assumed it was Pteria, a city mentioned in ancient Greek documents.
It took another ~ 70 years for German archaelogist Winckler to realize that this was the Hittite capital, based on clay tablets.
I don't see how this would invalidate the legitimacy of the documentation. The Hittites were large enough to be visible to contemporary historians and scriptures were used for information preserval. Even if our knowledge was only preserved through written documents, we'd have a good grasp of history 300 years ago, especially of major societies. People weren't primitive back then, they even had state archives with historical records which the Bible mentions in a few places for further reading.
That isn't to say that the Biblical texts can't reflect a memory passed on through oral tradition or knowledge from Mesopotamia and Egypt. But given that the geography of the Hittites of the Bible seems to line up more with the later "Neo-Hittite" Luwian-Arameans than Ḫattuša and that the Bible doesn't seem to be aware of the empire of Ḫattuša, the Biblical Hittites are probably not Ḫattuša.
Try 500 to 700 years. (Hittites collapsed around 1200 BC, the Old Testament was penned between the 700s and 500s BC.)
So some references from the Old Testament may correspond to people or places from many centuries earlier than the time when it was assembled, similarly to works like the Iliad and the Odyssey.
So the Hittites would better be called something like "Nessites".
Thus our name comes actually from the name of the people conquered by them (Hatti).
While the Hittites were originally identified with the people mentioned in the Bible, it is also possible that some or all of the references from the Bible are not to what we call Hittites, but to some "Hatti" people.
The Bible does not refer to the Hittite Empire but only to some people of Hittite origin that are encountered in the present territory of Israel, so they could have very well been of Hatti origin.
Nice time machine you've got there. Not just vases and bones, but thoughts and societal complexities.
They made a lot of enemies who finally, when the empire was weakened by internal troubles, ganged together to destroy it.
Applies to most of them.
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Anyway I think some of these documents are of communications with Hittite kings, so it would be great to get some instances of the "other side" of some of these letters.
I'm imagining a class on "begging for gold" being given to young Egyptian scribes.
A quotation from a letter sent by Ankhesenamun, Tutankhamun's widow, to Hittite king Šuppiluliuma I was found in Ḫattuša. Ankhesenamun asked Šuppiluliuma to send her one of her sons to marry her and become king of Egypt. Šuppiluliuma initially thinks this is a ruse, but the story eventually checks out and Šuppiluliuma sends a son. That son is killed on his journey and a war between Egypt and Ḫattuša ensues.
Whereas in the Bronze Age, they didn't have such devices as television, radio, cartoons, etc. - or at least, there was not as wide a distribution of illiterate-usable media among the illiterate then, as there are today.
The Mesoamerican advanced Stone Age peoples who had an ongoing encounter with the Spaniards certainly did have conscious thought, despite their gods. Why would Bronze Age peoples have been different in that respect?
I view this bicameral mind means of thinking, though, relatively banal - especially in the modern context where cultures are clashing over apparent willingness to consider each others consciousness, or not. I think there are plenty of examples of cultures in the modern era who deny each other conscious thought, even today, such that it justifies their wanton destruction.
The darkness lifting: I concur, it is always wonderful to gain insight into humans, past, through their own words. The interpretations of things over the aeons have put a distinct burl on the edges of our understanding; discoveries like this archive bring back the shine. The Hittites were real people, with normal human problems.
Clarity about relationship with the rest of PIE would definitely be enhanced by having a corpus from substantially earlier on.
I had assumed they had to wait for clay to dry before it could be carried anywhere, which seems incompatible with using them for urgent military messages. I wonder if there was a way to transport them while soft, or if this was just the archival copy of a message sent by other means.
What I wonder about is whether these tablets as they are found today were just air dried or if they were fired at all. I can imagine that they would get fired for archival purposes in the capital.
Digital information and toner/ink on paper will not last nearly that long.
Maybe humans of this age should be curating some etching on stone or even more durable materials, to record some of our history for posterity?
So, intermediary at best. My understanding is that R/W CDs are far less durable than earlier write-once CDs, but probably far less common for mass storage.
In the early 1990s I worked for a CD foundry. We mostly made CD backups of nuclear plant records, and short runs of off-brand music. The resist dye got EVERYWHERE, because humans spill things; red blotches on everyone's work shoes.
If those "3 year" predictions meant anything, half of our business would have gone for tape backups.... Don't know if it's accurate, of course.
And for predicting things, it's been a decade since I bought a computer with a disc reader of any sort.
I thought they'd last forever, decades anyhow, but I wonder now. What good are stone cds, if there are no readers in 50 years.
The CD foundry job must have had fun moments.
> The GitHub Arctic Code Vault is a long-term data preservation project that stores open-source software code deep inside the Arctic World Archive in Svalbard, Norway.
Wow, the infant daughter was nursing a baby? Were the Hittites like aphids which can be pregnant while still in the womb?
As much as I hate AI slop, sometimes I think people are better off leaving writing to robots.