Hittite

Hittite speakers entered Anatolia sometime before 2000 BCE, probably filtering down from the Pontic steppes along routes archaeologists still debate. They settled among the Hatti, an older people whose name the newcomers eventually borrowed for their land and their state, even while speaking an entirely different tongue. They called their own language Nešili, the speech of Nesa, after the city of Kanesh where the earliest Hittite words surface — embedded as loanwords inside Assyrian merchant tablets left by traders who never guessed they were inadvertently preserving a new branch of the world's largest language family.

The empire they built at Hattusa — a craggy citadel riding a river bend on the Anatolian plateau — became one of the three great powers of the Late Bronze Age, alongside Egypt and Assyria. At its height around 1274 BCE, the Hittite army met Ramesses II at Kadesh on the Orontes River in what both sides called the greatest battle ever fought. The resulting peace treaty, the oldest surviving international agreement, was inscribed in Hittite cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs simultaneously. A replica hangs today outside the United Nations Security Council chamber.

Hittite is the oldest attested Indo-European language, and its decipherment in 1915 by the Czech linguist Bedřich Hrozný rewrote prehistory. When Hrozný worked through the tablets excavated at Hattusa, he found cognates scattered through the text like keys hidden in plain sight. The word for water was wadar, unmistakably kin to English water and German Wasser. The word for eat was ezzateni, cousin to Latin edere. A language dead for three thousand years was suddenly illuminating the common ancestor of half the world's languages, confirming that Indo-European must be ancient indeed.

The Bronze Age Collapse around 1200 BCE extinguished Hittite as a living administrative tongue almost overnight. The empire shattered, Hattusa burned, and survivors scattered into small city-states in southeastern Anatolia and northern Syria, where the related language Luwian rather than Hittite became the new prestige tongue. Hittite left no living descendants. But the thousands of tablets baked hard in the fires that destroyed the very archives housing them ensured that the language would speak again — once the right scholars, working in the rubble of a forgotten capital, learned to listen.