Archaeological research in the Middle East is revealing how a long-forgotten ancient civilisation used previously undiscovered linguistics to promote multiculturalism and political stability.
Ongoing excavations in Turkey – in the ruins of the ancient capital of the Hittite empire – are yielding remarkable evidence that the imperial civil service included entire departments fully or partly dedicated to researching the religions of subject peoples.
So far, modern experts on ancient languages have discovered that Hittite civil servants preserved and recorded religious documents from at least five subject ethnic groups.
That in turn raises the possibility that other small previously unknown Middle Eastern languages will be discovered, recorded on Hittite imperial clay tablets, in the particular series of ancient scriptoria that the archaeologists are currently excavating at Bogazkoy.
The empire’s civil service scribes wrote all their manuscripts in a Hittite version of a pre-existing Mesopotamian-originating script (the oldest writing system in the world) called cuneiform, consisting of wedge-shaped lines arranged in groups representing syllables.
The ongoing archaeological research at Bogazkoy is shedding remarkable new light on how Hittite civilisation functioned – and thus on how it helped transform human history.
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Archaeological research in the Middle East is revealing how a long-forgotten ancient civilisation used previously undiscovered linguistics to promote multiculturalism and political stability.
Ongoing excavations in Turkey – in the ruins of the ancient capital of the Hittite empire – are yielding remarkable evidence that the imperial civil service included entire departments fully or partly dedicated to researching the religions of subject peoples.
So far, modern experts on ancient languages have discovered that Hittite civil servants preserved and recorded religious documents from at least five subject ethnic groups.
That in turn raises the possibility that other small previously unknown Middle Eastern languages will be discovered, recorded on Hittite imperial clay tablets, in the particular series of ancient scriptoria that the archaeologists are currently excavating at Bogazkoy.
The empire’s civil service scribes wrote all their manuscripts in a Hittite version of a pre-existing Mesopotamian-originating script (the oldest writing system in the world) called cuneiform, consisting of wedge-shaped lines arranged in groups representing syllables.
The ongoing archaeological research at Bogazkoy is shedding remarkable new light on how Hittite civilisation functioned – and thus on how it helped transform human history.
The original article contains 888 words, the summary contains 188 words. Saved 79%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!