The Indo-European language family

Untill recently The Hittites have been to us chiefly from references in the Old Testament. Abraham bought the burial place for Sarah from a Hittite (Gen.23), and Bathsheba, whom David coveted, was the wife of Uriah the Hittite (2 Sam.11). Their language was preserved only in a few uninterpreted documents. In 1907, however, an archaeological expedition uncovered the site of the Hittite capital in Asia Minor, at Boghazköi, about ninety miles east of Angora, containing the royal archives of nearly 10 000 clay tablets. The texts were written in Babylonian cuneiform characters and some were in Babylonian (Akkadian), the diplomatic language of the day. Most of the tablets, however, were in an unknown language. Although a number of different languages seem to have been spoken in the Hittite area, nine tenths of the tablets are in the principal language of the kingdom. It is apparently not the original language of the district, but it has been given the name Hittite. The sudden opening up of so extensive a collection of texts has permitted considerable progress to be made in the study of this language. The results so far attained make it fairly certain that by its structure. Hittite should be accounted an Indo-European language. In vocabulary, however, the evidence is less clear. A large proportion of the words used comes from an unindentified non-Indo-European source. The contamination with foreign elements appears to be as great as in Albanian. By some scholars Hittite is treated as co-ordinate with Indo-European, and the period of joint existence is designated Indo-Hittite. It is sufficient, however, to think of Hittite as having separated from the Indo-European community some centuries (perhaps five hundred years or more) before any of the other groups began to detach themselves.