king - hittite problem

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Egypt Exploration Society

Note on the Hittite ProblemAuthor(s): L. W. KingSource: The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Vol. 4, No. 2/3 (Apr. - Jul., 1917), pp. 190-193Published by: Egypt Exploration SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3853887

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NOTE ON THE HITTITE PROBLEMBY L. W. KING

[An article written by the late Professor J. H. Moulton, and printed in the Expository Times for lastD)ecember, has directed sonmeattention to the recent work of Prof. Hrozn; in deciphering Hittite texts andto his claim to have determined the character of that language. In view of the important bearing of theHittite texts upon the history of ancient Egypt, Dr King was asked to summarize the facts and to estimatethe probability of Prof. Hrozny's claim; in response to our request, he has written the note which is hereprinted.-ED.]

NEWS reached this country early last year that Dr F. Hrozny, Professor of SemiticLanguages at Vienna, had claimed, in a lecture delivered at Berlin, to have solved theHittite problem and to have proved that the Hittite language was of Indo-Europeancharacter. A preliminary statement of his theory was published in the Mitteilungen derDeutschen Orient-Gesellsciaft, No. 56 (December, 1915), which in due course found its wayto our chief public libraries. This was the only issue of the Mitteilungen since December,1914, and was devoted entirely to the Hittite question. It was mainly taken up by Prof.Hrozny's statement, which was prefaced by a historical introduction from the pen ofProfessor Eduard Meyer, who provisionally accepted his results; Dr Otto Weber alsocontributed a note on the progress that had been made in preparing the Hittite texts atConstantinople and Berlin for publication. Professor Moulton, who had received a copy ofthe ilitteitungen from a friend in Holland, reproduced the more striking features of thesereports, but was careful to say at the end of his article that he refrained from comment,preferring merely to report; and he added that the work must clearly undergo severetesting. A further word of caution against an immediate acceptance of the theory as awhole will not, perhaps, be out of place.There are, of course, two classes of Hittite inscriptions, and, consequently, two methodsof decipherment have been employed. The earlier decipherers had only the hieroglyphicinscriptions to work on, which are carved on rock-faces at many sites in Asia Minorand upon stone wall-slabs and stone objects recovered by excavation; and they hadto guess the sound as well as the meaning of the words. The Hittite texts fromBoghaz Keui, which were excavated for the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft in 1906-7 and1911-12 by the late Hugo Winckler and Makridy Bey, are written in the Babyloniancharacter upon clay tablets; in them, consequently, the sound of the words is knownwith certainty and it is only their meaning that must be determined. The language ofthese texts is undoubtedly Hittite, the tongue spoken at atti, the capital of theHittite Empire; and it is usually, but not universally assumed that the hieroglyphic


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NOTE ON THE HITTITE PROBLEMinscriptions expressed the same language (possibly with dialectic differences, varyingwith date and district) in the native character. Illness prevented Winckler fromsupplementing his first study of the Boghaz Keui tablets, which appeared in M.D.O.G.,No. 35; but, after his death in 1913, the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft arranged fortheir systematic publication. The material is enormous: Dr Weber conjectures that theremay be 20,000 texts and fragments in Constantinople alone. When Halil Bey and hisassistant showed me the collection in the basement of the Ottoman Museum, in May 1914,they hazarded an even larger estimate; the texts were packed closely on the shelves andtables of three large rooms, and many boxes had still at that time to be examined. Itwill be obvious that the systematic study of these Hittite cuneiform texts, written ina character that can be read with ease, must precede any renewed attempt at inter-preting the Hittite hieroglyphic inscriptions upon stone, if we assume that the languagein each case is the same. Dr Hrozny has therefore confined his attention to them, withoutany reference to the separate problem presented by the Hittite hieroglyphic inscriptions.

The suggestion that Hittite might be regarded as belonging to the Indo-Europeangroup of languages was first put forward by the late Dr Kundtzon of Christiania, who hadmade a special study of the two Arzawa letters from Tell el-Amarna. Dr Hrozny supportsthis contention from the enlarged material at his disposal, and he claims to prove his caseby the Hittite verb-inflexion and declension, and by parts of the Hittite vocabulary, especiallywords which he identifies as pronouns and adverbs. He also goes farther, in classifyingHittite with the Western, not the Eastern, Indo-European group. It would be impossiblewithin the limits of this note to reproduce his argument in detail, but the character of hisequations may be indicated by a few of the more striking examples. The Hittite wordwa-a-dar, for example, he renders 'water,' Old Sax. watar, Gr. ivwcp,etc., and with thechange of r to n in its genitive (u-e-te-na-as) he compares Lat. femur, feminis; Hit. a-ku-wa-an-na he renders 'drink' and compares L. aqua, 'water'; Hit. da-an-na he ienders 'gift'(L. donum),and he cites as a Hittite participle da-a-an, pl. da-an-te-es, 'giving.' Amonghis list of Hittite adverbs he includes the equations a-ap-pa (d7r-), pa-ra-a (7rapa),kat-ta (KaTr),an-da (L. endo, indu, Gr. evWov), i-ra-an (irepi, 7repuv),and in some instanceshe gives examples of their use before the verb; while in his list of pronouns we findHit. uga, ug='I' (cp. L. ego), Hit. kuis (L. quis), kuid (L. quid), kuis kuis (L. quisquis),kuiski (L. quisque), kuidki (L. quidque), kuwadka (L. quodque), etc. These examples aresufficiently striking in themselves, and, with others he gives, they certainly suggest a closerdialectic connexion with the Western than with the Eastern group of Indo-Europeanlanguages. The conclusion is therefore reached that the Hittites, or at least a consider-able section of them, must be assumed to have migrated to Asia Minor from WesternEurope, passing across the Bosphorus according to Dr Hrozny, or, on Prof. Meyer's alter-native, round the north of the Black Sea. They would thus apparently have had to traverseEastern Europe, already occupied by the European representatives of the Eastern Indo-European group.Any detailed criticism of Dr Hrozny's theory must necessarily be premature until theappearance of his promised work, in which the summary statement he has already given isto be supplemented by his evidence in full. Moreover, until the texts themselves areavailable, no independent test is possible. Meanwhile there are some factors in the problemwhich perhaps need emphasis. One is that our archaeological evidence gives no supportto the conjectured racial character of the Hittites themselves; in their own reliefs or uponJourn. of Egypt. Arch. iv. 25

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L. W. KINGEgyptian monuments there is no suggestion of Indo-European type. Equally at variancewith their supposed origin are their proper names, the names of their gods, and what littlewe know of Hittite religion. Moreover, it is admitted that in the mass of Hittite textsalready examined the vocabulary in general presents no Indo-European parallels, theresemblances noted being confined to flexion and some of the smaller words. This lastdifficulty is strikingly illustrated by one of the most valuable classes of the Boghaz Keuitexts,-the Sumero-Akkadian-Hittite vocabularies or word-lists, which were compiled bythe Hittites themselves as an aid in their study of the languages of Babylonia. Fromthem we ascertained the meaning, as well as the sound, of some seventy Hittite wordsand expressions. Before publishing them for the Berlin Academy shortly before the war,Prof. Delitzsch showed this list of Hittite expressions and their meanings to various philo-logists and experts, and none had been able to suggest from that evidence the group oflanguages to which Hittite should be assigned.The possibility thus asserts itself that the Indo-European characteristics noted byDr Hrozny, so far as they may prove to be substantiated, may not be original elementsof the language, but later accretions, due perhaps in part to the Indo-Iranian or Aryanspeech of the ruling class in Mitanni, to whom, according to the current interpretationof Winckler's most famous text, the Vedic deities Indra, Mitra, Varuna and the Nasatyatwins are to be assigned. We have evidence that Hatti, the Hittite speech of BoghazKeui, was strongly influenced by another tongue, Harri; the latter is no longer to beidentified as "Aryan," for the numerous examples in the Boghaz Keui collection at Con-stantinople prove it to be a non-Indo-European language. It occurs especially in the ritualtexts, beside the native Hittite, and may, as Dr Hrozny suggests, represent an older and atthat time a sacred speech, which may have influenced Hittite much as Sumerian influencedthe Semitic speech of Babylonia. In Hittite we are thus presumably dealing with a mixedlanguage, and any Indo-European features it possessed may not have been original.In this country a criticism of Dr Hrozny's theory has been made by Dr Cowley ina paper read before the Royal Asiatic Society last December. This has not yet beenpublished, but in the brief summary of the proceedings in the Journal of that society(J.R.A.S., Jan. 1917, p. 202 f.) it is stated that he regards the theory as not proven.While allowing the possibility of an Indo-European element in the Hittite language,he suggests that it belonged essentially to the same group as some (or all) of thenon-Greek languages (Lycian, Lydian, etc.) of Asia Minor, Cyprus, and Crete. That isa reasonable alternative to Dr Hrozny's theory, and it is certainly supported by parallelsin religious cult and belief.

In particular, the problem of Lydian appears to present some very similar featuresto that of Hittite. As a result of his study of the Lydian inscriptions discovered atSardis by the American Expedition, Dr Littmann has classified forms of the 3rd pers.sing. and plur. in the verb, and a nominative and an oblique case in the substantive,which are apparently of Indo-European character; while 'and,' he suggests, is repre-sented by an enclitic -k (see Sardis, Vol. VI, Pt i, 'Lydian Inscriptions,' 1916). ButDr Giles, the Master of Emmanuel, in a paper on the Lydian inscriptions read beforethe Cambridge Philological Society in January (see CanmbridgeUniversity Reporter,No. 2136, 27 Feb., 1917, p. 588), notes that the language itself 'does not look Indo-Germanic.' Moreover,he cites Tocharian and Mr Dawkins' Greek dialects of Asia Minor toprove the existence of'Indo-Germanic languages with endings borrowedfrom languages of

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NOTE ON THE HITTITE PROBLEManother stock'; and his conclusion with regard to Lydian is that, while it is not atpresent possible to dogmatize, yet 'in a language which ultimately succumbed to Indo-Germanic languages, it may be wise to weigh the possibility of borrowed endings beforeany decision is arrived at.' Dr Giles' view is also accepted by Mr Stanley Cook inhis edition of the new Lydian-Aramaic bilingual from Sardis (see Journal of HellenicStudies, 1917, pp. 77 ff.). We thus have a curious parallel to the problem presentedby Dr Hrozny. It is true that Hittite, unlike Lydian, did not succumb to Indo-European languages; but the possibility of borrowed endings should, in its case also,be taken into account.

It must be admitted that the cumulative effect of the suggested Indo-Europeanfeatures of Hittite deduced by Dr Hrozny is impressive; one or two examples of parallel-ism might well have been regarded as fortuitous, but the very number he cites suggeststhe presence of some Indo-European influence. Another consideration, which inspiresconfidence in his decipherment of the texts, is the constant employment of ideograms bythe Hittite scribes, especially in letters, treaties, and historical inscriptions. For theideograms consist of Semitic-Babylonian words, often with their appropriate Babylonianpronominal suffixes. Though we may not know how the Hittites pronounced these words,we know their meanings in Babylonian, and consequently they often give the general senseof a passage. All that is then necessary is to guess the meanings of the interveningHittite words, which are written syllabically. This method had already been followed byWinckler in the translations of Hittite texts which he produced. The correctness of theresulting translation does not essentially depend on any linguistic theory, though ofcourse the process is immensely simplified if the affinity of the language with any knowntongue is recognized.

Winckler had already extracted the more striking historical facts from the BoghazKeui documents, especially froln those in the Akkadian (or Semitic Babylonian) language,of which many have been recovered. But there can be no doubt that his results will besupplemented considerably when the texts are systematically studied and published. As anearnest of what we may expect I will conclude this note by referring to an interestinglittle extract from a historical text in the Hittite tongue, which Dr Hrozny transliteratesand translates to illustrate his method of decipherment. Here, too, the general sense isclearly indicated by the Babylonian words employed as Hittite ideograms. The passagerelates that when Bibhururias (king of Egypt) died, the queen of Egypt, Dahamun...by name, wrote (apparently to the reigning Hittite king) suggesting that, as she had noson and he had many, he should send her one of his sons who should become her spouse.Bibhururias, as Professors Meyer and Schafer suggest, can only be Neb-kheperu-Ra (Tut-ankh-Amen), the second successor and the son-in-law of Amenophis IV. From the Hittiterecord we may assume that his widow attempted to retain or regain her power by Hittitehelp and the offer of marriage with a Hittite prince, who would thus have secured thethrone of Egypt. In addition to Ai, the actual successor of Tut-ankh-Amen, there appearto have been one or two other ephemeral pretenders to the throne at the close of theXVIIIth Dynasty; and the episode related may well have taken place in this period ofconfusion before Horemheb, with the support of the Theban priesthood and the army,secured the throne and completed the restoration of Amen-worship. We may expect withsome confidence that the Boghaz Keui texts, when published, will help us to fill otherlacunae in Egyptian history of the period.

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