Egypt Exploration Society
Note on the Hittite Problem Author(s): L. W. King Source: The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Vol. 4, No. 2/3 (Apr. - Jul., 1917), pp. 190-193 Published by: Egypt Exploration Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3853887 Accessed: 09/10/2008 21:20 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ees. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
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NOTE ON THE HITTITE PROBLEM BY L. W. KING [An article written by the late Professor J. H. Moulton, and printed in the Expository Times for last D)ecember, has directed sonmeattention to the recent work of Prof. Hrozn; in deciphering Hittite texts and to his claim to have determined the character of that language. In view of the important bearing of the Hittite texts upon the history of ancient Egypt, Dr King was asked to summarize the facts and to estimate the probability of Prof. Hrozny's claim; in response to our request, he has written the note which is here printed.-ED.]
NEWS reached this country early last year that Dr F. Hrozny, Professor of Semitic Languages at Vienna, had claimed, in a lecture delivered at Berlin, to have solved the Hittite problem and to have proved that the Hittite language was of Indo-European character. A preliminary statement of his theory was published in the Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellsciaft, No. 56 (December, 1915), which in due course found its way to 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 of Professor Eduard Meyer, who provisionally accepted his results; Dr Otto Weber also contributed a note on the progress that had been made in preparing the Hittite texts at Constantinople and Berlin for publication. Professor Moulton, who had received a copy of the ilitteitungen from a friend in Holland, reproduced the more striking features of these reports, 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 severe testing. A further word of caution against an immediate acceptance of the theory as a whole will not, perhaps, be out of place. There are, of course, two classes of Hittite inscriptions, and, consequently, two methods of decipherment have been employed. The earlier decipherers had only the hieroglyphic inscriptions to work on, which are carved on rock-faces at many sites in Asia Minor and upon stone wall-slabs and stone objects recovered by excavation; and they had to guess the sound as well as the meaning of the words. The Hittite texts from Boghaz Keui, which were excavated for the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft in 1906-7 and 1911-12 by the late Hugo Winckler and Makridy Bey, are written in the Babylonian character upon clay tablets; in them, consequently, the sound of the words is known with certainty and it is only their meaning that must be determined. The language of these texts is undoubtedly Hittite, the tongue spoken at atti, the capital of the Hittite Empire; and it is usually, but not universally assumed that the hieroglyphic
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inscriptions expressed the same language (possibly with dialectic differences, varying with date and district) in the native character. Illness prevented Winckler from supplementing 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 for their systematic publication. The material is enormous: Dr Weber conjectures that there may be 20,000 texts and fragments in Constantinople alone. When Halil Bey and his assistant 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 and tables of three large rooms, and many boxes had still at that time to be examined. It will be obvious that the systematic study of these Hittite cuneiform texts, written in a character that can be read with ease, must precede any renewed attempt at interpreting the Hittite hieroglyphic inscriptions upon stone, if we assume that the language in each case is the same. Dr Hrozny has therefore confined his attention to them, without any reference to the separate problem presented by the Hittite hieroglyphic inscriptions. The suggestion that Hittite might be regarded as belonging to the Indo-European group of languages was first put forward by the late Dr Kundtzon of Christiania, who had made a special study of the two Arzawa letters from Tell el-Amarna. Dr Hrozny supports this contention from the enlarged material at his disposal, and he claims to prove his case by the Hittite verb-inflexion and declension, and by parts of the Hittite vocabulary, especially words which he identifies as pronouns and adverbs. He also goes farther, in classifying Hittite with the Western, not the Eastern, Indo-European group. It would be impossible within the limits of this note to reproduce his argument in detail, but the character of his equations may be indicated by a few of the more striking examples. The Hittite word wa-a-dar, for example, he renders 'water,' Old Sax. watar, Gr. ivwcp, etc., and with the change of r to n in its genitive (u-e-te-na-as) he compares Lat. femur, feminis; Hit. a-kuwa-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.' Among his 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),bi-ra-an (irepi, 7repuv),and in some instances he gives examples of their use before the verb; while in his list of pronouns we find Hit. 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 are sufficiently striking in themselves, and, with others he gives, they certainly suggest a closer dialectic connexion with the Western than with the Eastern group of Indo-European languages. The conclusion is therefore reached that the Hittites, or at least a considerable section of them, must be assumed to have migrated to Asia Minor from Western Europe, passing across the Bosphorus according to Dr Hrozny, or, on Prof. Meyer's alternative, round the north of the Black Sea. They would thus apparently have had to traverse Eastern Europe, already occupied by the European representatives of the Eastern IndoEuropean group. Any detailed criticism of Dr Hrozny's theory must necessarily be premature until the appearance of his promised work, in which the summary statement he has already given is to be supplemented by his evidence in full. Moreover, until the texts themselves are available, no independent test is possible. Meanwhile there are some factors in the problem which perhaps need emphasis. One is that our archaeological evidence gives no support to the conjectured racial character of the Hittites themselves; in their own reliefs or upon Journ. of Egypt. Arch. iv.
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Egyptian monuments there is no suggestion of Indo-European type. Equally at variance with their supposed origin are their proper names, the names of their gods, and what little we know of Hittite religion. Moreover, it is admitted that in the mass of Hittite texts already examined the vocabulary in general presents no Indo-European parallels, the resemblances noted being confined to flexion and some of the smaller words. This last difficulty is strikingly illustrated by one of the most valuable classes of the Boghaz Keui texts,-the Sumero-Akkadian-Hittite vocabularies or word-lists, which were compiled by the Hittites themselves as an aid in their study of the languages of Babylonia. From them we ascertained the meaning, as well as the sound, of some seventy Hittite words and 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 philologists and experts, and none had been able to suggest from that evidence the group of languages to which Hittite should be assigned. The possibility thus asserts itself that the Indo-European characteristics noted by Dr Hrozny, so far as they may prove to be substantiated, may not be original elements of the language, but later accretions, due perhaps in part to the Indo-Iranian or Aryan speech of the ruling class in Mitanni, to whom, according to the current interpretation of Winckler's most famous text, the Vedic deities Indra, Mitra, Varuna and the Nasatya twins are to be assigned. We have evidence that Hatti, the Hittite speech of Boghaz Keui, was strongly influenced by another tongue, Harri; the latter is no longer to be identified as " Aryan," for the numerous examples in the Boghaz Keui collection at Constantinople prove it to be a non-Indo-European language. It occurs especially in the ritual texts, beside the native Hittite, and may, as Dr Hrozny suggests, represent an older and at that time a sacred speech, which may have influenced Hittite much as Sumerian influenced the Semitic speech of Babylonia. In Hittite we are thus presumably dealing with a mixed language, 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 in a paper read before the Royal Asiatic Society last December. This has not yet been published, 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 the non-Greek languages (Lycian, Lydian, etc.) of Asia Minor, Cyprus, and Crete. That is a reasonable alternative to Dr Hrozny's theory, and it is certainly supported by parallels in religious cult and belief. In particular, the problem of Lydian appears to present some very similar features to that of Hittite. As a result of his study of the Lydian inscriptions discovered at Sardis 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 represented by an enclitic -k (see Sardis, Vol. VI, Pt i, 'Lydian Inscriptions,' 1916). But Dr Giles, the Master of Emmanuel, in a paper on the Lydian inscriptions read before the Cambridge Philological Society in January (see Canmbridge University Reporter, No. 2136, 27 Feb., 1917, p. 588), notes that the language itself 'does not look IndoGermanic.' Moreover,he cites Tocharian and Mr Dawkins' Greek dialects of Asia Minor to prove the existence of'Indo-Germanic languages with endings borrowed from languages of
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another stock'; and his conclusion with regard to Lydian is that, while it is not at present possible to dogmatize, yet 'in a language which ultimately succumbed to IndoGermanic languages, it may be wise to weigh the possibility of borrowed endings before any decision is arrived at.' Dr Giles' view is also accepted by Mr Stanley Cook in his edition of the new Lydian-Aramaic bilingual from Sardis (see Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1917, pp. 77 ff.). We thus have a curious parallel to the problem presented by Dr Hrozny. It is true that Hittite, unlike Lydian, did not succumb to IndoEuropean 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-European features of Hittite deduced by Dr Hrozny is impressive; one or two examples of parallelism might well have been regarded as fortuitous, but the very number he cites suggests the presence of some Indo-European influence. Another consideration, which inspires confidence in his decipherment of the texts, is the constant employment of ideograms by the Hittite scribes, especially in letters, treaties, and historical inscriptions. For the ideograms consist of Semitic-Babylonian words, often with their appropriate Babylonian pronominal 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 sense of a passage. All that is then necessary is to guess the meanings of the intervening Hittite words, which are written syllabically. This method had already been followed by Winckler in the translations of Hittite texts which he produced. The correctness of the resulting translation does not essentially depend on any linguistic theory, though of course the process is immensely simplified if the affinity of the language with any known tongue is recognized. Winckler had already extracted the more striking historical facts from the Boghaz Keui 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 be supplemented considerably when the texts are systematically studied and published. As an earnest of what we may expect I will conclude this note by referring to an interesting little extract from a historical text in the Hittite tongue, which Dr Hrozny transliterates and translates to illustrate his method of decipherment. Here, too, the general sense is clearly indicated by the Babylonian words employed as Hittite ideograms. The passage relates 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 no son 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 (Tutankh-Amen), the second successor and the son-in-law of Amenophis IV. From the Hittite record we may assume that his widow attempted to retain or regain her power by Hittite help and the offer of marriage with a Hittite prince, who would thus have secured the throne of Egypt. In addition to Ai, the actual successor of Tut-ankh-Amen, there appear to have been one or two other ephemeral pretenders to the throne at the close of the XVIIIth Dynasty; and the episode related may well have taken place in this period of confusion 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 with some confidence that the Boghaz Keui texts, when published, will help us to fill other lacunae in Egyptian history of the period.
