| ▲ | Hittite royal archive found in Turkey(thehistoryblog.com) |
| 177 points by benbreen 8 hours ago | 34 comments |
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| ▲ | schleck8 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| The Hittites were one of the largest empires in the ancient world, but up until the last two centuries, the only proper documentation of them was in the Bible, which is why many historians suspected that they were a fictional civilization. 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. |
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| ▲ | wl an hour ago | parent [-] | | The Bible is not proper documentation of the Hittites. All the texts that mention the Hittites post-date the fall of the empire based out of Ḫattuša by centuries. It's an open question whether the Hittites of the Bible refer to Ḫattuša or "Neo-Hittites" better described as Luwian-Aramean. | | |
| ▲ | schleck8 21 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > All the texts that mention the Hittites post-date the fall of the empire based out of Ḫattuša by centuries 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. |
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| ▲ | sherr 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The History Blog is a small gem because it is serious and not sensational. Always with a good level of detail for the average interested visitor, and from the original (or close by) sources. Plus pictures. |
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| ▲ | pluc 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | And they support RSS! Albeit through WordPress but nobody's perfect | | |
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| ▲ | flowerthoughts 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > This year’s excavation unearthed 131 cuneiform tablets and fragments which record an epidemic of fever, military logistics, religious practices and events of royal daily life 3,400 years ago. Nice time machine you've got there. Not just vases and bones, but thoughts and societal complexities. |
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| ▲ | wl 41 minutes ago | parent [-] | | My Hittite language class went online during COVID and switched from studying royal annals to the Plague Prayers of Muršili II. One of the most enlightening parts of studying the ancient world is seeing that even in very alien cultures separated by millennia, we're all just people. | | |
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| ▲ | idoubtit 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This article rephrases and shortens the original article: https://www.dailysabah.com/life/hittite-royal-archive-with-1... |
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| ▲ | vegnus 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is such incredible news! I was just wondering the other day if we are ever going to find more Bronze age writings. Such an endlessly fascinating time period |
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| ▲ | ajb an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "Another notable document is a letter from Hittite generals in western Anatolia appealing to the king for reinforcements in men, horses and chariots to fend off enemy forces. " 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. |
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| ▲ | AnimalMuppet 42 minutes ago | parent [-] | | It's not like they had to wait for the clay to dry, and then sent the message via email over fiber optic cable. It would take days to reach the palace. Drying it (maybe in a small kiln?) first was a small part of the delay. |
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| ▲ | einpoklum 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What artifacts are we leaving which will allow people in 3400 years to get a glimpse of daily events in our lives? 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? |
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| ▲ | wl 30 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | We've already seen this happen in the land of cuneiform. In the first millennium BCE, Akkadian cuneiform on tablets was replaced by Aramaic written on papyrus and vellum. The cuneiform survives in large quantity, the Aramaic barely at all. The Story of Aḥiqar, for example, comes from Mesopotamia and the only copy that survives in the original language somehow found its way to Elephantine in Egypt where the climate allowed it to (barely) survive. It puts Assyriologists in a weird position where there's plenty of textual documentation of earlier eras but far, far less in later eras. We're left with odd situations like the best documentation we have of Nebuchadnezzar II's reign coming from the Bible. | |
| ▲ | jopsen 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They can just ask you, you'll live on in the weights of the future models. | |
| ▲ | rantallion 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Isn't that one of the driving forces behind research like Project Silica? Sure, it won't capture everything that everyone produces, but the 'important stuff' can be preserved for millennia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage | |
| ▲ | b112 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | We have those CDs made of stone we could use! That's sorta a stone .. thing. | | |
| ▲ | IAmBroom 11 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The data is preserved in plastic, which is (so far) a less-digestible hydrocarbon than wood (paper) and skin (vellum). 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. |
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| ▲ | toomuchtodo 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | https://blog.archive.org/2025/10/29/a-peek-inside-the-physic... |
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| ▲ | jagaerglad 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| inb4 Turkish ultra-nationalists claiming their language is just a dialect of Turkish |
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| ▲ | usrnm 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The languages aren't even related. Hittite is an Indo-European language, closer related to English than Turkish | | |
| ▲ | logicchains an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Kurdish is also Indo-European, but that doesn't stop Turks claiming it's just a dialect of Turkish (mountain Turkish). | | |
| ▲ | mda 17 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Apart from a few idiots nobody claims it is Turkish dialect. There are some shared vocabulary, but thats pretty much it. Kurdish is much closer to Farsi. |
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| ▲ | Bayart an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | The current consensus is not that Hittite is Indo-European, it's that Anatolian languages (including Hittite) are related to Indo-European, both stemming from proto-Indo-Anatolian. | | |
| ▲ | TFNA 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I actually work in this field, so I can encourage you to do some further reading and get to grips with the terminology. "Indo-European" remains among experts the most popular way to refer to the entire language family, Anatolian and non-Anatolian. Terms like "Nuclear IE" and "Core IE" are often employed to distinguish the non-Anatolian languages. "Indo-Anatolian" for the higher-level family is a term that some may use here and there, but no expert would ever make a "well, acktually..." remark as you just did to those in a discussion, professional or layman, using "Indo-European" | |
| ▲ | wl 13 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I don't think that's the consensus. Even if it were the consensus, the I doubt the people making the argument would disagree that the Anatolian languages are closely related to the Indo-European languages. The grammar is classic Indo-European, with 7-9 cases depending on the period. The vocabulary has a lot of cognates with Indo-European languages. The only things that really distinguish Hittite from Indo-European languages are the system of enclitics and grammatical gender based on animacy rather than the usual masculine/feminine/neuter. | |
| ▲ | DC-3 43 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's not the consensus and even if it were it's largely a pointless semantic argument. |
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| ▲ | m_a_g 13 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is not reddit | |
| ▲ | aaa_aaa an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | In 1930s. | |
| ▲ | timdiggerm 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | isn't everything? |
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