Then the Assyrian records, too, were found to make frequent references at a later date to several kingdoms of people called the Khatti, who lived in various parts of Syria—kingdoms which successively fell before the onslaught of the Assyrian kings in the ninth and eighth centuries B.C.

Further light was thrown upon the Hittites by the discovery in 1887 of the Tell el-Amarna tablets, which included a letter to the Egyptian king Akhnaton from the Hittite king Suppiluliumas to congratulate him on his accession to the throne (1377 B.C.).

Various sculptured stones and hieroglyphic inscriptions in Syria and Asia Minor were ascribed to the Hittites by W. Wright, A. H. Sayce, and other scholars,³ because they were found in the territory where the Hittites were known to have lived; but the many attempts to decipher the hieroglyphs have until recently proved unsuccessful.⁴

In the last decade of the nineteenth century fragments of cuneiform tablets were discovered at the village of Bögaz-köy in East-central Asia Minor, written in an unknown language which Pere Scheil, who published them, took to be the language of the Hittites—rightly, as it turned out. In 1906-7 the German archaeologist Hugo Winckler uncovered at Bögaz-köy a record office of the Hittite Empire, containing the royal archives, amounting to some 10,000 clay tablets. For Bögaz-köy (“Village of the Pass”) marks the site of Khattusas, which was for about four centuries (c. 1600-1200 B.C.) the capital city of the Hittite Empire.

There was little difficulty in reading these tablets, for their script was cuneiform; but to understand them was another matter, for most of the languages—eight in number⁵ —represented in the archives were unknown. Two languages represented, however, were known—Sumerian and Akkadian—and the records in these tongues left no doubt as to what the tablets really were; but some years passed before the meaning of the others could be made out. The honour of establishing the character of the chief language of the eight belongs to Professor Bedrich Hrozný, of Prague, who was then on the staff of Vienna University. He found the solution while he was studying the tablets in Istanbul in 1915 for the Deutsche Orientgesellschaft.⁶ The English reader will find an account of the discovery in the article “Hittites” contributed by Professor Hrozný to the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1929). It was proved that this language—the official language of the Hittite Empire—was Indo-European, that it belonged to the great family of languages which embraces the Indic, Iranian, “Tocharian", Thraco-Phrygian, Greek, Illyrian, Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, and Slavonic linguistic groups.⁷ Another interesting fact which emerged was that this Hittite language was identical with a language hitherto called Arzawan, known from two letters in the Tell el-Amarna collection, one of which was a letter from Amenhotep III of Egypt to Tarkhuntaraba, “king of the land of Arzawa” (in Cilicia). As early as 1902 the Norwegian scholar J. Knudtzon, the editor of the Tell el-Amarna tablets, had pronounced the language of the two Arzawa letters to be Indo-European⁸; but such opposition was offered to his view that he withdrew it.

Now that the nature of the principal Hittite language was discovered, a number of scholars of various nations gave their attention to the reading and interpretation of the Bögaz-köy archives, with the result that the history of the Hittite Empire, previously known in fragmentary fashion from the records of Egypt and Assyria, was now learned at first hand.

² In this paper the guttural spirant in Egyptian, Akkadian, and Hittite words is, for general convenience, transliterated kh.

³ See accounts by Wright, The Empire of the Hittites (1884); Sayce, The Hittites (1888; 4th ed. 1925); A. E. Cowley, The Hittites (1920); D. G. Hogarth, Kings of the Hittites (1926).

⁴ The leading worker on Hittite hieroglyphs is Professor Ignace J. Gelb of Chicago University; see his Hittite Hieroglyphs i-iii (1932-35-42); Hittite Hieroglyphic Monuments (1939).

⁵ These eight languages are Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite, Proto-Hittite, Luwian, Palaic, Hurrian and Aryan.

⁶ He announced his discovery in “Die Lösung des hethitischen Problems” in Mitteilungen der deutschen Orientgesellschaft, No. 56 (1915), and in Die Sprache der Hethiter (1916-17).

⁷ On the Hittite language see E. H. Sturtevant, Comparative Grammar of the Hittite Language (1933), Hittite Glossary (2nd ed., 1936), and Supplement to Hittite Glossary (1937), and E. H. Sturtevant and G. Bechtel, Hittite Chrestomathy (1935). Sturtevant holds that Hittite is not in the ordinary sense an Indo-European language, but that Hittite and Proto-Indo-European are both descended from a common parent stock which he calls “Indo-Hittite”; this view is accepted by several scholars, but is quite unnecessary. Hittite was radically affected by the influence of other languages. Its Indo-European character is evident from its morphology rather than its vocabulary. Many words from native Anatolian languages have found their way into it. If its phonology and morphology are simpler than those of other early Indo-European languages, this is not because it was a language in the making, but one whose synthetic structure had already begun to break down, under the impact of other languages (cf. Old English under the impact of Norman French, Bulgarian under the impact of invaders speaking a Turco-Tataric language, Persian under the impact of Arabic).

⁸ J. Knudtzon, Die zwei Arzawabriefe: die ältesten Urkunden in indogermanischer Sprache (1902).