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85-409: Nunura's name was written in cuneiform as Nun-ur 4 -ra or Nin-ur 4 -ra , though the latter spelling is considered unusual. The name could also be represented by the logogram BÁḪAR, "potter". However, this combination of signs could also be used to write at least five other theonyms: Aruru , Lil, Enenuru, Nunšar and Šaršar, the last three of which are secondary names of Enki /Ea. Additionally, in

170-529: A saḫar , a porous vessel used as a container for water in exorcisms, from clay earlier cleansed by the purification goddess Kusu . A text found in Nimrud contains the phrase "Nunurra, fired from a great kiln", likely the beginning of another unpreserved formula. The compendium CBS 6060, an esoteric text assigning deities to substances or objects, states that porringers correspond to Nunura and then in turn explains this name as Ea. Cuneiform Cuneiform

255-533: A sister language to Proto-Indo-European , rather than as a daughter language . Their Indo-Hittite hypothesis is that the parent language (Indo-Hittite) lacked the features that are absent in Hittite as well, and that Proto-Indo-European later innovated them. Other linguists, however, prefer the Schwund ("loss") Hypothesis in which Hittite (or Anatolian) came from Proto-Indo-European, with its full range of features, but

340-508: A verbal noun , a supine , and a participle . Rose (2006) lists 132 hi verbs and interprets the hi / mi oppositions as vestiges of a system of grammatical voice ("centripetal voice" vs. "centrifugal voice"). The mi -conjugation is similar to the general verbal conjugation paradigm in Sanskrit and can also be compared to the class of mi -verbs in Ancient Greek. The following example uses

425-401: A completely unknown writing system in 19th-century Assyriology . It was successfully deciphered by 1857. The cuneiform script changed considerably over more than 2,000 years. The image below shows the development of the sign SAĜ "head" (Borger nr. 184, U+12295 𒊕 ). Stages: The cuneiform script was developed from pictographic proto-writing in the late 4th millennium BC, stemming from

510-550: A given sign could have various meanings depending on context. The sign inventory was reduced from some 1,500 signs to some 600 signs, and writing became increasingly phonological . Determinative signs were re-introduced to avoid ambiguity. Cuneiform writing proper thus arises from the more primitive system of pictographs at about that time, labeled the Early Bronze Age II epoch by historians. The earliest known Sumerian king, whose name appears on contemporary cuneiform tablets,

595-577: A language structure typical of the non-Indo-European agglutinative Sumerian language . The first tablets using syllabic elements date to the Early Dynastic I–II periods c.  2800 BC , and they are agreed to be clearly in Sumerian. This is the time when some pictographic element started to be used for their phonetic value, permitting the recording of abstract ideas or personal names. Many pictographs began to lose their original function, and

680-641: A phonetic complement. Yet even in those days, the Babylonian syllabary remained a mixture of logographic and phonemic writing. Elamite cuneiform was a simplified form of the Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform, used to write the Elamite language in the area that corresponds to modern Iran from the 3rd millennium BC to the 4th century BC. Elamite cuneiform at times competed with other local scripts, Proto-Elamite and Linear Elamite . The earliest known Elamite cuneiform text

765-432: A pointed stylus, sometimes called "linear cuneiform". Many of the early dynastic inscriptions, particularly those made on stone, continued to use the linear style as late as circa 2000 BC. In the mid-3rd millennium BC, a new wedge-tipped stylus was introduced which was pushed into the clay, producing wedge-shaped cuneiform. This development made writing quicker and easier, especially when writing on soft clay. By adjusting

850-477: A resemblance to Old Japanese , written in a Chinese-derived script, where some of these Sinograms were used as logograms and others as phonetic characters. This "mixed" method of writing continued through the end of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, although there were periods when "purism" was in fashion and there was a more marked tendency to spell out the words laboriously, in preference to using signs with

935-471: A rudimentary noun-class system that was based on an older animate–inanimate opposition. Hittite inflects for nine cases : nominative , vocative , accusative , genitive , dative - locative , ablative , ergative , allative , and instrumental ; two numbers : singular, and plural; and two animacy classes: animate (common), and inanimate (neuter). Adjectives and pronouns agree with nouns for animacy , number , and case . The distinction in animacy

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1020-409: A second he named "Ḫattuša Hittite" (or Hittite proper). The first is attested in clay tablets from Kaniš/Neša ( Kültepe ), and is dated earlier than the findings from Ḫattuša. Hittite was written in an adapted form of Peripheral Akkadian cuneiform orthography from Northern Syria. The predominantly syllabic nature of the script makes it difficult to ascertain the precise phonetic qualities of some of

1105-548: A sharpened reed stylus or incised in stone. This early style lacked the characteristic wedge shape of the strokes. Most Proto-Cuneiform records from this period were of an accounting nature. The proto-cuneiform sign list has grown, as new texts are discovered, and shrunk, as variant signs are combined. The current sign list is 705 elements long with 42 being numeric and four considered pre-proto-Elamite. Certain signs to indicate names of gods, countries, cities, vessels, birds, trees, etc., are known as determinatives and were

1190-559: A slightly different way. From the 6th century, the Akkadian language was marginalized by Aramaic , written in the Aramaic alphabet , but Akkadian cuneiform remained in use in the literary tradition well into the times of the Parthian Empire (250 BC–226 AD). The last known cuneiform inscription, an astronomical text, was written in 75 AD. The ability to read cuneiform may have persisted until

1275-607: A stylus. Writing is first recorded in Uruk , at the end of the 4th millennium BC, and soon after in various parts of the Near-East . An ancient Mesopotamian poem gives the first known story of the invention of writing : Because the messenger's mouth was heavy and he couldn't repeat [the message], the Lord of Kulaba patted some clay and put words on it, like a tablet. Until then, there had been no putting words on clay. The cuneiform writing system

1360-428: Is Enmebaragesi of Kish (fl. c.  2600 BC ). Surviving records became less fragmentary for following reigns and by the arrival of Sargon, it had become standard practice for each major city-state to date documents by year-names, commemorating the exploits of its king. Geoffrey Sampson stated that Egyptian hieroglyphs "came into existence a little after Sumerian script , and, probably, [were] invented under

1445-514: Is a logo - syllabic writing system that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East . The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era . Cuneiform scripts are marked by and named for the characteristic wedge-shaped impressions ( Latin : cuneus ) which form their signs . Cuneiform is the earliest known writing system and

1530-552: Is a treaty between Akkadians and the Elamites that dates back to 2200 BC. Some believe it might have been in use since 2500 BC. The tablets are poorly preserved, so only limited parts can be read, but it is understood that the text is a treaty between the Akkad king Nāramsîn and Elamite ruler Hita , as indicated by frequent references like "Nāramsîn's friend is my friend, Nāramsîn's enemy is my enemy". The most famous Elamite scriptures and

1615-495: Is also evidence for a length distinction. He points out that the word " e-ku-ud-du – [ɛ́kʷːtu]" does not show any voice assimilation. However, if the distinction were one of voice, agreement between the stops should be expected since the velar and the alveolar plosives are known to be adjacent since that word's "u" represents not a vowel but labialization . Hittite preserves some very archaic features lost in other Indo-European languages. For example, Hittite has retained two of

1700-579: Is an adaptation of the Old Assyrian cuneiform of c. 1800 BC to the Hittite language and was used from the 17th until approximately the 13th century BC. More or less the same system was used by the scribes of the Hittite Empire for two other Anatolian languages , namely Luwian (alongside the native Anatolian hieroglyphics ) and Palaic , as well as for the isolate Hattic language . When the cuneiform script

1785-542: Is attested in a number of incantations. A text of this genre from the third millennium BCE lists him alongside Enki and Asalluhi , who are common in magical formulas, and Ninshubur , who is otherwise virtually absent from the corpus of such texts from this period. If the restoration is correct, he is invoked to get rid of demons from a house, similarly as in later sources such as Udug Hul . Said incantation series describes Nunura heating up various ingredients associated with magic and medicine in an oven (tablet 9, line 47'). He

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1870-429: Is called gunû or "gunification"; if signs are cross-hatched with additional Winkelhaken , they are called šešig ; if signs are modified by the removal of a wedge or wedges, they are called nutillu . "Typical" signs have about five to ten wedges, while complex ligatures can consist of twenty or more (although it is not always clear if a ligature should be considered a single sign or two collated, but distinct signs);

1955-503: Is explained as "Ea of the potter".. It is presumed this is an example of a broader late tendence of equating artisan deities with him, in Nunura's case possibly made easier by the resemblance of his name to the magical formula enenuru , which was associated with Ea. Nunura also played a role in apotropaic magic and exorcisms. An incantation related to ablution rites refers to him as the "lord of purification" ( lugal nam-išib-ke 4 ). Nunura

2040-469: Is invoked to remove a demon from a house in a "pot fired in a pure kiln from a pure place". It is presumed that it was a real container used in the ritual, as the passage appears to also invoke other deities, for example Ningirima , Nisaba and Lisin , in relation to tools or materials which are known to have played a role in Mesopotamian exorcisms. An Old Babylonian incantation describes Nunura preparing

2125-410: Is rudimentary and generally occurs in the nominative case , and the same noun is sometimes attested in both animacy classes. There is a trend towards distinguishing fewer cases in the plural than in the singular. The ergative case is used when an inanimate noun is the subject of a transitive verb . Early Hittite texts have a vocative case for a few nouns with -u , but it ceased to be productive by

2210-531: The Hittite sound inventory . The syllabary distinguishes the following consonants (notably, the Akkadian s series is dropped), The Akkadian unvoiced/voiced series (k/g, p/b, t/d) do not express the voiced/unvoiced contrast in writing, but double spellings in intervocalic positions represent voiceless consonants in Indo-European ( Sturtevant's law ). The limitations of the syllabic script in helping to determine

2295-453: The Iron Age (c. 10th to 6th centuries BC), Assyrian cuneiform was further simplified. The characters remained the same as those of Sumero-Akkadian cuneiforms, but the graphic design of each character relied more heavily on wedges and square angles, making them significantly more abstract: Babylonian cuneiform was simplified along similar lines during that period, albeit to a lesser extent and in

2380-729: The Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin , the Louvre , the Istanbul Archaeology Museums , the National Museum of Iraq , the Yale Babylonian Collection (approx. 40,000), and Penn Museum . Most of these have "lain in these collections for a century without being translated, studied or published", as there are only a few hundred qualified cuneiformists in the world. The decipherment of cuneiform began with

2465-469: The Winkelhaken impressed vertically by the tip of the stylus. The signs exemplary of these basic wedges are: Except for the Winkelhaken , which has no tail, the length of the wedges' tails could vary as required for sign composition. Signs tilted by about 45 degrees are called tenû in Akkadian, thus DIŠ is a vertical wedge and DIŠ tenû a diagonal one. If a sign is modified with additional wedges, this

2550-627: The lexical list Diri Nippur the meaning of two logograms, BÁḪAR and SIMUG ("smith"), is seemingly swapped around, with the former explained as the blacksmith god Ninagal and the latter as Nunura. Markham J. Geller refers to Nunurra as a female deity. Hower, other authors consistently describe him as male. Nunura functioned as a divine potter. He was addressed as the potter of Anu ( Sumerian : báḫar gal an-na-ke 4 , Akkadian : pa-ḫa-ru rabû šá a-nim ), though he could also be associated with Ea. In late god lists they could be equated with each other, one example being An = Anu ša amēli , where Nunura

2635-404: The proto-language . See #Classification above for more details. Hittite is the oldest attested Indo-European language, yet it lacks several grammatical features that are exhibited by other early-attested Indo-European languages such as Vedic , Classical Latin , Ancient Greek , Old Persian and Old Avestan . Notably, Hittite did not have a masculine–feminine gender system. Instead, it had

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2720-401: The 23rd century BC ( short chronology ). The Akkadian language being East Semitic , its structure was completely different from Sumerian. The Akkadians found a practical solution in writing their language phonetically, using the corresponding Sumerian phonetic signs. Still, many of the Sumerian characters were retained for their logographic value as well: for example the character for "sheep"

2805-504: The 3rd millennium Sumerian script. Ugaritic was written using the Ugaritic alphabet , a standard Semitic style alphabet (an abjad ) written using the cuneiform method. Between half a million and two million cuneiform tablets are estimated to have been excavated in modern times, of which only approximately 30,000 –100,000 have been read or published. The British Museum holds the largest collection (approx. 130,000 tablets), followed by

2890-473: The Akkadian period, at the time of the Uruk ruler Lugalzagesi (r. c. 2294–2270 BC). The vertical style remained for monumental purposes on stone stelas until the middle of the 2nd millennium. Written Sumerian was used as a scribal language until the first century AD. The spoken language died out between about 2100 and 1700 BC. The archaic cuneiform script was adopted by the Akkadian Empire from

2975-504: The Hittite noun declension's most basic form: The verbal morphology is less complicated than for other early-attested Indo-European languages like Ancient Greek and Vedic . Hittite verbs inflect according to two general conjugations ( mi -conjugation and hi -conjugation), two voices ( active and medio-passive ), two moods ( indicative mood and imperative ), two aspects (perfective and imperfective), and two tenses ( present and preterite ). Verbs have two infinitive forms,

3060-542: The Old Persian text. Because Elamite is unlike its neighboring Semitic languages , the script's decipherment was delayed until the 1840s. Elamite cuneiform appears to have used far fewer signs than its Akkadian prototype and initially relied primarily on syllabograms, but logograms became more common in later texts. Many signs soon acquired highly distinctive local shape variants that are often difficult to recognise as related to their Akkadian prototypes. Hittite cuneiform

3145-471: The Sumerian signs of the terms in question, added as a guide for the reader. Proper names continued to be usually written in purely "logographic" fashion. The first inscribed tablets were purely pictographic, which makes it technically difficult to know in which language they were written. Different languages have been proposed, though usually Sumerian is assumed. Later tablets dating after c.  2900 BC start to use syllabic elements, which clearly show

3230-510: The Sumerians was not intuitive to Semitic speakers. From the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age (20th century BC), the script evolved to accommodate the various dialects of Akkadian: Old Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian. At this stage, the former pictograms were reduced to a high level of abstraction, and were composed of only five basic wedge shapes: horizontal, vertical, two diagonals and

3315-565: The adverb nesili (or nasili , nisili ), "in the [speech] of Neša (Kaneš)", an important city during the early stages of the Hittite Old Kingdom . In one case, the label is Kanisumnili , "in the [speech] of the people of Kaneš". Although the Hittite New Kingdom had people from many diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, the Hittite language was used in most secular written texts. In spite of various arguments over

3400-552: The alternation in the word for water between the nominative singular, wadar , and the genitive singular, wedenas . He also presented a set of regular sound correspondences. After a brief initial delay because of disruption during the First World War , Hrozný's decipherment, tentative grammatical analysis and demonstration of the Indo-European affiliation of Hittite were rapidly accepted and more broadly substantiated by contemporary scholars such as Edgar H. Sturtevant , who authored

3485-489: The appropriateness of the term, Hittite remains the most current term because of convention and the strength of association with the Biblical Hittites . The endonymic term nešili , and its Anglicized variants ( Nesite , Nessite , Neshite ), have never caught on. The first substantive claim as to the affiliation of Hittite was made by Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon in 1902, in a book devoted to two letters between

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3570-414: The beginning, similar-sounding words such as "life" [til] and "arrow" [ti] were written with the same symbol (𒋾). As a result, many signs gradually changed from being logograms to also functioning as syllabograms , so that for example, the sign for the word "arrow" would become the sign for the sound "ti". Syllabograms were used in Sumerian writing especially to express grammatical elements, and their use

3655-431: The compound IGI.A (𒅆𒀀) – "eye" + "water" – has the reading imhur , meaning "foam"). Several symbols had too many meanings to permit clarity. Therefore, symbols were put together to indicate both the sound and the meaning of a symbol. For instance, the word 'raven' (UGA) had the same logogram (𒉀) as the word 'soap' (NAGA), the name of a city (EREŠ), and the patron goddess of Eresh (NISABA). To disambiguate and identify

3740-447: The cuneiform logo-syllabary proper. The latest known cuneiform tablet dates to 75 AD. Cuneiform was rediscovered in modern times in the early 17th century with the publication of the trilingual Achaemenid royal inscriptions at Persepolis ; these were first deciphered in the early 19th century. The modern study of cuneiform belongs to the ambiguously named field of Assyriology , as the earliest excavations of cuneiform libraries – in

3825-508: The decipherment of Old Persian cuneiform in 1836. The first cuneiform inscriptions published in modern times were copied from the Achaemenid royal inscriptions in the ruins of Persepolis , with the first complete and accurate copy being published in 1778 by Carsten Niebuhr . Niebuhr's publication was used by Grotefend in 1802 to make the first breakthrough – the realization that Niebuhr had published three different languages side by side and

3910-545: The development of Egyptian hieroglyphs, with the suggestion the former influenced the latter. But given the lack of direct evidence for the transfer of writing, "no definitive determination has been made as to the origin of hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt". Others have held that "the evidence for such direct influence remains flimsy" and that "a very credible argument can also be made for the independent development of writing in Egypt..." Early cuneiform inscriptions were made by using

3995-458: The discovery of laryngeals in Hittite was a remarkable confirmation of Saussure's hypothesis. Both the preservation of the laryngeals and the lack of evidence that Hittite shared certain grammatical features in the other early Indo-European languages have led some philologists to believe that the Anatolian languages split from the rest of Proto-Indo-European much earlier than the other divisions of

4080-446: The early Achaemenid rulers from the 6th century BC down to the 4th century BC. Because of its simplicity and logical structure, the Old Persian cuneiform script was the first to be deciphered by modern scholars, starting with the accomplishments of Georg Friedrich Grotefend in 1802. Various ancient bilingual or trilingual inscriptions then permitted to decipher the other, much more complicated and more ancient scripts, as far back as to

4165-441: The familiar Akkadian cuneiform script but in an unknown language were discovered by Hugo Winckler in what is now the village of Boğazköy , Turkey, which was the former site of Hattusa , the capital of the Hittite state. Based on a study of this extensive material , Bedřich Hrozný succeeded in analyzing the language. He presented his argument that the language is Indo-European in a paper published in 1915 (Hrozný 1915), which

4250-516: The features became simplified in Hittite. According to Craig Melchert , the current tendency (as of 2012) is to suppose that Proto-Indo-European evolved and that the "prehistoric speakers" of Anatolian became isolated "from the rest of the PIE speech community, so as not to share in some common innovations". Hittite and the other Anatolian languages split off from Proto-Indo-European at an early stage. Hittite thus preserved archaisms that would be lost in

4335-963: The first scientifically acceptable Hittite grammar with a chrestomathy and a glossary. The most up-to-date grammar of the Hittite language is currently Hoffner and Melchert (2008). Hittite is one of the Anatolian languages and is known from cuneiform tablets and inscriptions that were erected by the Hittite kings. The script formerly known as "Hieroglyphic Hittite" is now termed Hieroglyphic Luwian. The Anatolian branch also includes Cuneiform Luwian , Hieroglyphic Luwian , Palaic , Lycian , Milyan , Lydian , Carian , Pisidian , Sidetic and Isaurian . Unlike most other Indo-European languages, Hittite does not distinguish between masculine and feminine grammatical gender, and it lacks subjunctive and optative moods as well as aspect. Various hypotheses have been formulated to explain these differences. Some linguists , most notably Edgar H. Sturtevant and Warren Cowgill , have argued that Hittite should be classified as

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4420-436: The geminate series of plosives is the one descending from Proto-Indo-European voiceless stops , and the simple plosives come from both voiced and voiced aspirate stops, which is often referred as Sturtevant's law . Because of the typological implications of Sturtevant's law, the distinction between the two series is commonly regarded as one of voice. However, there is no agreement over the subject among scholars since some view

4505-509: The identification of the Hatti ( Ḫatti ) kingdom with the Biblical Hittites ( Biblical Hebrew : * חתים Ḥittim ), although that name appears to have been applied incorrectly: The term Hattian refers to the indigenous people who preceded the Hittites, speaking a non-Indo-European Hattic language . In multilingual texts found in Hittite locations, passages written in Hittite are preceded by

4590-413: The influence of the latter", and that it is "probable that the general idea of expressing words of a language in writing was brought to Egypt from Sumerian Mesopotamia". There are many instances of Egypt-Mesopotamia relations at the time of the invention of writing, and standard reconstructions of the development of writing generally place the development of the Sumerian proto-cuneiform script before

4675-422: The king of Egypt and a Hittite ruler, found at El-Amarna , Egypt . Knudtzon argued that Hittite was Indo-European, largely because of its morphology . Although he had no bilingual texts, he was able to provide a partial interpretation of the two letters because of the formulaic nature of the diplomatic correspondence of the period. Knudtzon was definitively shown to have been correct when many tablets written in

4760-407: The ligature KAxGUR 7 consists of 31 strokes. Most later adaptations of Sumerian cuneiform preserved at least some aspects of the Sumerian script. Written Akkadian included phonetic symbols from the Sumerian syllabary , together with logograms that were read as whole words. Many signs in the script were polyvalent, having both a syllabic and logographic meaning. The complexity of the system bears

4845-443: The meaning and the other the pronunciation (e.g. 𒅗 ka 'mouth' was combined with the sign 𒉣 nun 'prince' to express the word 𒅻 nundum , meaning 'lip', formally KA×NUN; cf. Chinese phono-semantic compounds ). Another way of expressing words that had no sign of their own was by so-called 'Diri compounds' – sign sequences that have, in combination, a reading different from the sum of the individual constituent signs (for example,

4930-560: The mid-19th century – were in the area of ancient Assyria . An estimated half a million tablets are held in museums across the world, but comparatively few of these are published . The largest collections belong to the British Museum ( approx. 130,000 tablets), the Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin , the Louvre , the Istanbul Archaeology Museums , the National Museum of Iraq , the Yale Babylonian Collection ( approx. 40,000 tablets), and Penn Museum . Writing began after pottery

5015-476: The nature of Hittite phonology have been more or less overcome by means of comparative etymology and an examination of Hittite spelling conventions. Accordingly, scholars have surmised that Hittite possessed the following phonemes: Hittite had two series of consonants, one which was written always geminate in the original script, and another that was always simple. In cuneiform , all consonant sounds except for glides could be geminate. It has long been noticed that

5100-463: The near eastern token system used for accounting. The meaning and usage of these tokens is still a matter of debate. These tokens were in use from the 9th millennium BC and remained in occasional use even late in the 2nd millennium BC. Early tokens with pictographic shapes of animals, associated with numbers, were discovered in Tell Brak , and date to the mid-4th millennium BC. It has been suggested that

5185-755: The norm for other writings. The Hittite language has traditionally been stratified into Old Hittite (OH), Middle Hittite (MH) and New Hittite or Neo-Hittite (NH, not to be confused with the polysemic use of " Neo-Hittite " label as a designation for the later period, which is actually post-Hittite), corresponding to the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms of the Hittite history ( c.  1750 –1500 BC, 1500–1430 BC and 1430–1180 BC, respectively). The stages are differentiated on both linguistic and paleographic grounds. Hittitologist Alwin Kloekhorst (2019) recognizes two dialectal variants of Hittite: one he calls "Kanišite Hittite", and

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5270-561: The northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia . The language, now long extinct, is attested in cuneiform , in records dating from the 17th ( Anitta text ) to the 13th centuries BC, with isolated Hittite loanwords and numerous personal names appearing in an Old Assyrian context from as early as the 20th century BC, making it the earliest attested use of the Indo-European languages. By the Late Bronze Age , Hittite had started losing ground to its close relative Luwian . It appears that Luwian

5355-470: The ones that ultimately led to its decipherment are the ones found in the trilingual Behistun inscriptions , commissioned by the Achaemenid kings. The inscriptions, similar to that of the Rosetta Stone 's, were written in three different writing systems. The first was Old Persian , which was deciphered in 1802 by Georg Friedrich Grotefend . The second, Babylonian cuneiform, was deciphered shortly after

5440-582: The other Indo-European languages. Hittite has many loanwords, particularly religious vocabulary from the non-Indo-European Hurrian and Hattic languages. The latter was the language of the Hattians , the local inhabitants of the land of Hatti before they were absorbed or displaced by the Hittites . Sacred and magical texts from Hattusa were often written in Hattic, Hurrian and Luwian even after Hittite had become

5525-487: The recognition of the word "king". Hittite language Hittite (natively: 𒌷𒉌𒅆𒇷 , romanized:  nešili , lit.   'the language of Neša ', or nešumnili lit.   ' the language of the people of Neša ' ), also known as Nesite (Nešite/Neshite, Nessite), is an extinct Indo-European language that was spoken by the Hittites , a people of Bronze Age Anatolia who created an empire centred on Hattusa , as well as parts of

5610-449: The relative position of the stylus to the tablet, the writer could use a single tool to make a variety of impressions. For numbers, a round-tipped stylus was initially used, until the wedge-tipped stylus was generalized. The direction of writing was from top-to-bottom and right-to-left. Cuneiform clay tablets could be fired in kilns to bake them hard, and so provide a permanent record, or they could be left moist and recycled if permanence

5695-428: The series as if they were differenced by length , which a literal interpretation of the cuneiform orthography would suggest. Supporters of a length distinction usually point to the fact that Akkadian , the language from which the Hittites borrowed the cuneiform script, had voicing, but Hittite scribes used voiced and voiceless signs interchangeably. Alwin Kloekhorst also argues that the absence of assimilatory voicing

5780-415: The syllable [ɡu] had fourteen different symbols. The inventory of signs was expanded by the combination of existing signs into compound signs. They could either derive their meaning from a combination of the meanings of both original signs (e.g. 𒅗 ka 'mouth' and 𒀀 a 'water' were combined to form the sign for 𒅘 nag̃ 'drink', formally KA×A; cf. Chinese compound ideographs ), or one sign could suggest

5865-472: The third century AD. The complexity of cuneiforms prompted the development of a number of simplified versions of the script. Old Persian cuneiform was developed with an independent and unrelated set of simple cuneiform characters, by Darius the Great in the 5th century BC. Most scholars consider this writing system to be an independent invention because it has no obvious connections with other writing systems at

5950-450: The three laryngeals ( * h₂ and * h₃ word-initially). Those sounds, whose existence had been hypothesized in 1879 by Ferdinand de Saussure , on the basis of vowel quality in other Indo-European languages, were not preserved as separate sounds in any attested Indo-European language until the discovery of Hittite. In Hittite, the phoneme is written as ḫ . In that respect, Hittite is unlike any other attested Indo-European language and so

6035-487: The time of the earliest discovered sources and was subsumed by the nominative in most documents. The allative was subsumed in the later stages of the language by the dative - locative . An archaic genitive plural -an is found irregularly in earlier texts, as is an instrumental plural in -it . A few nouns also form a distinct locative , which had no case ending at all. The examples of pišna- ("man") for animate and pēda- ("place") for inanimate are used here to show

6120-432: The time, such as Elamite , Akkadian, Hurrian , and Hittite cuneiforms. It formed a semi-alphabetic syllabary, using far fewer wedge strokes than Assyrian used, together with a handful of logograms for frequently occurring words like "god" ( 𐏎 ), "king" ( 𐏋 ) or "country" ( 𐏌 ). This almost purely alphabetical form of the cuneiform script (36 phonetic characters and 8 logograms), was specially designed and used by

6205-652: The token shapes were the original basis for some of the Sumerian pictographs. Mesopotamia's "proto-literate" period spans roughly the 35th to 32nd centuries BC. The first unequivocal written documents start with the Uruk IV period, from circa 3,300 BC, followed by tablets found in Uruk III, Jemdet Nasr , Early Dynastic I Ur and Susa (in Proto-Elamite ) dating to the period until circa 2,900 BC. Originally, pictographs were either drawn on clay tablets in vertical columns with

6290-585: The two languages are related, their writing systems seem to have been developed separately. For Hurrian, there were even different systems in different polities (in Mitanni , in Mari , in the Hittite Empire). The Hurrian orthographies were generally characterised by more extensive use of syllabograms and more limited use of logograms than Akkadian. Urartian, in comparison, retained a more significant role for logograms. In

6375-443: The verb ēš-/aš- "to be". Hittite is a head-final language: it has subject-object-verb word order , a split ergative alignment , and is a synthetic language ; adpositions follow their complement , adjectives and genitives precede the nouns that they modify, adverbs precede verbs, and subordinate clauses precede main clauses . Hittite syntax shows one noteworthy feature that is typical of Anatolian languages: commonly,

6460-565: The word more precisely, two phonetic complements were added – Ú (𒌑) for the syllable [u] in front of the symbol and GA (𒂵) for the syllable [ga] behind. Finally, the symbol for 'bird', MUŠEN (𒄷) was added to ensure proper interpretation. As a result, the whole word could be spelt 𒌑𒉀𒂵𒄷, i.e. Ú.NAGA.GA (among the many variant spellings that the word could have). For unknown reasons, cuneiform pictographs, until then written vertically, were rotated 90° counterclockwise, in effect putting them on their side. This change first occurred slightly before

6545-561: Was adapted to writing Hittite, a layer of Akkadian logographic spellings, also known as Akkadograms, was added to the script, in addition to the Sumerian logograms, or Sumerograms, which were already inherent in the Akkadian writing system and which Hittite also kept. Thus the pronunciations of many Hittite words which were conventionally written by logograms are now unknown. The Hurrian language (attested 2300–1000 BC) and Urartian language (attested 9th–6th century BC) were also written in adapted versions of Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform. Although

6630-406: Was further developed and modified in the writing of the Akkadian language to express its sounds. Often, words that had a similar meaning but very different sounds were written with the same symbol. For instance the Sumerian words 'tooth' [zu], 'mouth' [ka] and 'voice' [gu] were all written with the original pictogram for mouth (𒅗). Words that sounded alike would have different signs; for instance,

6715-448: Was in use for more than three millennia, through several stages of development, from the 31st century BC down to the second century AD. The latest firmly dateable tablet, from Uruk, dates to 79/80 AD. Ultimately, it was completely replaced by alphabetic writing , in the general sense, in the course of the Roman era , and there are no cuneiform systems in current use. It had to be deciphered as

6800-478: Was invented, during the Neolithic , when clay tokens were used to record specific amounts of livestock or commodities. In recent years a contrarian view has arisen on the tokens being the precursor of writing. These tokens were initially impressed on the surface of round clay envelopes ( clay bullae ) and then stored in them. The tokens were then progressively replaced by flat tablets, on which signs were recorded with

6885-451: Was not needed. Most surviving cuneiform tablets were of the latter kind, accidentally preserved when fires destroyed the tablets' storage place and effectively baked them, unintentionally ensuring their longevity. The script was widely used on commemorative stelae and carved reliefs to record the achievements of the ruler in whose honor the monument had been erected. The spoken language included many homophones and near-homophones, and in

6970-706: Was originally developed to write the Sumerian language of southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq ). Over the course of its history, cuneiform was adapted to write a number of languages in addition to Sumerian. Akkadian texts are attested from the 24th century BC onward and make up the bulk of the cuneiform record. Akkadian cuneiform was itself adapted to write the Hittite language in the early second millennium BC . The other languages with significant cuneiform corpora are Eblaite , Elamite , Hurrian , Luwian , and Urartian . The Old Persian and Ugaritic alphabets feature cuneiform-style signs; however, they are unrelated to

7055-406: Was retained, but was now pronounced immerum , rather than the Sumerian udu . Such retained individual signs or, sometimes, entire sign combinations with logographic value are known as Sumerograms , a type of heterogram . The East Semitic languages employed equivalents for many signs that were distorted or abbreviated to represent new values because the syllabic nature of the script as refined by

7140-457: Was soon followed by a grammar of the language (Hrozný 1917). Hrozný's argument for the Indo-European affiliation of Hittite was thoroughly modern although poorly substantiated. He focused on the striking similarities in idiosyncratic aspects of the morphology that are unlikely to occur independently by chance or to be borrowed. They included the r / n alternation in some noun stems (the heteroclitics ) and vocalic ablaut , which are both seen in

7225-467: Was the most widely spoken language in the Hittite capital, Hattusa, in the 13th century BC. After the collapse of the Hittite New Kingdom during the more general Late Bronze Age collapse , Luwian emerged in the Early Iron Age as the main language of the so-called Syro-Hittite states , in southwestern Anatolia and northern Syria . Hittite is the modern scholarly name for the language, based on

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