An undiscovered Indo-European language has been discovered thanks to an excavation in Turkey. Professor Daniel Schwemer, a specialist in the ancient Near East, is looking into the find.
At this excavation site at the foot of Ambarlikaya in Boğazköy-Hattusha in Turkey, a cuneiform tablet with a previously unknown Indo-European language was discovered. Credit: Andreas Schachner / Deutsches Archäologisches Institut
The UNESCO World Heritage Site Boğazköy-Hattusha in north-central Turkey is where the new language was found. The Hittite Empire, one of the major players in Western Asia during the Late Bronze Age (1650–1200 BC), originally had its capital here.
The German Archaeological Institute has been leading excavations in Boğazköy-Hattusha for more over a century. Since 1986, the location has been recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. To date, about 30,000 clay tablets containing cuneiform writing have been discovered there. These tablets, which were recognized as part of the UNESCO World Documentary Heritage in 2001, offer extensive details about the Hittites and their neighbors' history, society, economy, and religious practices.
The German Archaeological Institute's Istanbul Department's yearly archaeological expeditions are led by Professor Andreas Schachner, who is currently the site's director, and they continue to uncover more cuneiform artifacts. Hittite, the first known Indo-European language, is the language that predominates at the site and is used in the majority of the manuscripts. But this year's excavations turned up something unexpected: A recitation in a hitherto undiscovered tongue is concealed in a Hittite ritual document for a cult.
Foreign languages piqued the interest of the Hittites
The cuneiform artifacts from the excavation are being studied by Professor Schwemer, the director of the Chair of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Germany. He claims that the new idiom is referred to in the Hittite ritual text as the language of the Kalašma-speaking region. This is a region that is thought to be around Bolu or Gerede in modern-day Turkey, on the northern fringe of the Hittite heartland.
The discovery of another language in the Boğazköy-Hattusha archives is not entirely unexpected, as Prof. Schwemer explains: "The Hittites were uniquely interested in recording rituals in foreign languages."
These ceremonial texts were created by scribes for the Hittite ruler and reflect a variety of Mesopotamian, Syrian, and Anatolian cultural traditions. The ceremonies offer insightful glimpses into the little-known Late Bronze Age linguistic environments of Anatolia, where languages other than Hittite were also spoken. Thus, sections in Luwian and Palaic, two other Anatolian-Indo-European languages closely related to Hittite, as well as Hattic, a non-Indo-European language, may be found in cuneiform documents at Boğazköy-Hattusha. Now, Kalasma language can be added to these.
The new language is being classified more precisely
The Kalasmaic manuscript is currently completely unreadable because it was written in a recently discovered language. The idiom is a member of the family of Anatolian-Indo-European languages, according to Professor Elisabeth Rieken (Marburg University), an expert in ancient Anatolian languages and a colleague of Prof. Schwemer's.
Rieken claims that despite being geographically close to the region where Palaic was spoken, the text appears to have more characteristics with Luwian. Further research will be done to determine how closely linked Kalasma's language is to the other Luwian dialects of Late Bronze Age Anatolia.
