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WHO WERE THE
HITTITES?
& THE
HITTITES OF ANATOLIA
The
Hittites History & Related Cultures
(Paperback - 8 Feb 2011)
Robert D. Morritt
Availability
Who were the Hittites?
Investigates the mysterious society often mentioned in the Bible and looks at
the monuments, their religion also a little background on the Elamites.
From the earliest times travelers were mystified by unusual
inscriptions that appeared on monuments and old clay tablets, within these
pages we follow the attempts from the earliest times. to decipher the Hittite
language from  the
wedge-shaped text on clay tablets lain dormant for over 3000 years.
The book describes the quest to
decipher the language, which was continued by numerous scholars An overview
of the language, culture and of the Neo-Hittites is presented in order to
help us understand this once unknown archaic society.
The book notes that, Sir Thomas Herbert
noted in 1634 he had had seen in Persepolis, carved on a wall, “a dozen lines
of strange characters…consisting of figures, obelisk, triangular, and
pyramidal” he thought they resembled Greek.
Further the discovery by , Henry Rawlinson,
a British East India Company army officer, investigated the Behistun
Inscriptions in Persia., which bore three inscriptions of text of Old Persian, Babylonian and
Elamite.The Behistun inscriptions was to the decipherment of cuneiform, what
the Rosetta Stone was to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
The quest to decipher and to read
the language continued by numerous scholars such as Carsten
Niebuhr,(who brought the first
complete and accurate copies of the inscriptions at Persepolis to
Europe.) Bishop Frederic Munter of
Copenhagen who noted that the words
in the Persian inscriptions were divided from one another by an oblique wedge
and further observed that one word
was prevalent., the word to signify “King”: In 1802 Georg Friedrich Grotefend determined that two of the King's names mentioned were Darius and
Xerxes, he then assigned alphabetic
values to those cuneiform characters that bore the two names. Later (in 1836) Eugène Burnouf who discovered
that inscriptions published by
Niebuhr contained a list of the satrapies of Darius. With this clue in his
hand, he identified and published an alphabet of thirty letters, most of which
he had correctly deciphered.
Burnouf's pupil, Professor Christian Lassen of Bonn, published a work on "The Old Persian
Cuneiform Inscriptions of Persepolis"
In 1906, at Hattusa a
German expedition found archives of the Hittite kings in cuneiform,
but in an unknown language. . Professor
Bedrich Hrozný discovered Hittite belonged to the Indo-European family of
languages and was related to 100 of 494 words this laid the groundwork for the development
of Hittitology.. His
accomplishments led to his greatest achievement, the decipherment of the
Hittite language.
The Hittites used cuneiform letters.
Archaeological expeditions have discovered in Hattushash entire sets of royal
archives in cuneiform tablets, written either in Akkadian, the diplomatic
language of the time, or in the various dialects of the Hittite
confederation.
Turkey's soil is rich in ruins:
Ottoman, Roman, Seljuk, Byzantine, Greek, but far older than any of those
cultures—and forgotten almost entirely for 3000 years—are the remains of the
first Indo-European power in the Mediterranean area: the Hittites.
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