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Hittites: Languages
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The Hittites were a patriarchal, highly agricultural society. They had rich iron deposits which they mined and traded with the Assyrians. They ... used it for weaponry and were rather successful in the use of a three-man chariot. Through trade and conquest the languages and cultures of their neighbors seeped into Hittite society. Babylonian and Hurrian deities were worshiped along-side or assimilated with the native Hittite deities. This merging of cultures and free use of foreign languages is rather fortuitous.
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Hittites spoke a language belonging to the Indo-European linguistic family. They used Akkadian’s cuneiform writing system to write their language. The first Hittite tablets were discovered in 1906 by German excavators. Within ten years the language had been deciphered, and a sketch of its grammar published. Gradually, the international community of scholars, led by the Germans, expanded the knowledge of the language. The number of common Hittite words that one could translate with reasonable certainty increased gradually.
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The artistic work of the Hittites, as in reliefs, round sculptures, and seals, shows a high state of culture and considerable Babylonian and Assyrian influence. A great number of inscriptions have been uncovered in the Hittite area; these are for the most part in cuneiform. Besides the Babylonian inscriptions, there are many in Hittite hieroglyphs, or Kanesian. The Hittite language is Indo-European. There are several other languages meagerly represented in the Hittite archives: the so-called Luwian (similar to Hittite), and Khattian and Hurrian (both non–Indo-European and apparently unrelated to one another). There is ... a hieroglyphic alphabet (or syllabary) liberally represented; the deciphering of this script was aided by the bilingual texts found at Karatepe and was published by H. T. Bossert.
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Although they spoke an Indo-European language, the Hittites adopted many of the traditions of Mesopotamia, including the cuneiform writing system. At the capital, Hattusa, Archaeologists have excavated royal archives written in cuneiform on clay tablets.
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According to all the racial indicators recognized by leading anthropologist at the turn of the century, the modern Jews have more in common with the ancient Hittites, than with the ancient Israelites. In another early publication written about the same time, this statement is found in the article on the Hittites: "The human type is always brachycephalic [round-headed], with brow receding sharply and long nose making almost one line with the sloping forehead. In the sculptures of the Commagene and the Tyana districts, the nose has a long curving tip, of very Jewish appearance" (Enc. Brit. XIII (1910), 537). It should be evidently now that the round-headed hook-nosed Jews of today have a definite racial connection with the ancient Hittites, remembering or course what Joseph Jacobs wrote: "Some anthropologists are inclined to associate the racial origins of the Jews, not with the Semites, whose language they adopted, but with the Armenians and Hittites of Mesopotamia, whose broad skulls and cuffed noses they appear to have inherited" (Jew.
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The Hittites used cuneiform letters. Archaeological expeditions have discovered in Hattushash entire sets of royal archives in cuneiform tablets, written either in Babylonian, the diplomatic language of the time, or in the various dialects of the Hittite confederation.[3]
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