A team of researchers he announced the discovery of one new Indo-European language in a clay tablet dating back to 1200 BC found in an archaeological site in Türkiye. The new Indo-European language, It doesn’t have a name yetand according to scholars it may have been spoken by a local population who lived under the rule of the Hittite empireone of the most powerful civilizations of the Bronze Age.
The Hittite Empire it extended over much of Anatoliathe peninsula of modern Türkiye, and was notable for its military prowess and its rich culture; the Hittites were also known for their practice of recording their historical events, laws, and religious rituals on clay tablets with cuneiform writing, a wedge-shaped form of writing invented by the Sumerians.
The archaeological site where the tablet with the new Indo-European language was found is called Boğazköy-Hattushaor Hattusa, and it was there capital of the Hittite empire. The site has been declared world heritage site by UNESCO in 1986 for its impressive architecture and its well-preserved works of art, just think that since the 1980s, archaeologists have discovered nearly 30,000 clay tablets at the sitemost of which were written in Hittite, the official language of the empire.
However, as was seen with this latest excavation, some tablets turned out to be written in a different language, never seen before. The researchers analyzed the linguistic characteristics of the tablet and concluded that it is a new Indo-European language, that is, a language belonging to the same family of languages spoken today in most of Europe and some parts of Asia.
The new Indo-European language it may have been spoken by the people of Kalašmaa region located at the northwestern end of the Hittite heartland, and the tablet may contain the description of an ancient cult ritual carried out in Kalašma, moreover the language also shows some similarities to Luwiananother Indo-European language used in the Hittite Empire.
The discovery of the new Indo-European language is important because it offers an unprecedented look at the linguistic and cultural diversity of ancient Anatolia and on the relationships between the Hittites and the subjugated populations, furthermore the new language could help to reconstruct the history and evolution of the Indo-European languages and to better understand the common origins of many modern languages.
Everything we know about the tablet containing the new Indo-European language
The tablet with the new Indo-European language was discovered in 2019 by a German archaeological mission led by the professor Andreas Schachner, director of the German Archaeological Institute in Istanbul. The tablet, rectangular in shape and measuring approximately 18 x 16 cm, was found in a room of the royal palace of Hattusa, together with other tablets in Hittite and Akkadian, a Semitic language used as a lingua franca in the ancient Near East, in addition it features cuneiform writing on both sides and contains approximately 80 lines of text.
The text was deciphered and translated by a team of linguists from the University of Würzburgled by Professor Daniel Schwemer, an expert on the ancient Near East. The team compared the text with other Hittite and Luvite texts and identified some words and grammatical structures that do not belong to either language, after which they therefore hypothesized that it was a different Indo-European language, which may have been spoken by a different population called Kalašma, mentioned in other Hittite sources as a tributary area of the empire.
The text of the tablet appears to be an invocation to a deity called Pirwa, who may be the supreme god of the Kalašma religion. The text also describes a purification ritual that had to be performed by the Hittite king or his representative on the occasion of the visit to Kalašma, with the ritual consisting in offering animals, food, drinks and precious objects to the divinity, and in pronouncing prayers and oaths.
The text also reveals some aspects of Kalašma culture and society, such as the role of women, social hierarchy, magical beliefs and medical practices.
The discovery of the new Indo-European language has aroused great interest and curiosity among scholars and the public, it is in fact a unique and precious testimony of an unknown civilization that coexisted with the Hittites for centuries, without losing its linguistic and cultural identity. The discovery also opens up new perspectives for studying the origins and development of Indo-European languages, which underlie many modern languages spoken in Europe and Asia.
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