copy of an Akkadian version of a peace treaty drawn up between
one of the most famous of all pharaohs, Ramesses II, sometimes
called Ramesses the Great, and a Great King of Hatti, called
Hattusili. Where else but in the Hittite royal capital would such a
document be found? The site Winckler was excavating was the very
heart of the Hittite empire! (In all fairness, we should point out that
the actual credit for identifying this site as the Hittite capital
belongs to Georges Perrot, an Oriental scholar who two decades
earlier had written an article claiming that Boghazköy not
Carchemish was the capital of the Hittite empire. But it was not
until Winckler’s excavations that hard evidence for this
identification was found.)
The Akkadian tablets provided important information about
the city and the empire it ruled. But this information was still very
limited – and would remain so until the language used on the
majority of the tablets, no doubt the language of the‘Hittites’
themselves, could be read. That was a taskfinally achieved, during
World War I, by a Czech scholar called Bedřich Hrozny, who
had been released from war service to undertake it. Attempts by
earlier scholars had failed. At least thescriptin which the language
was written could be read since it was one commonly used in the
Near Eastern world. Its invention is associated with an Early
Bronze Age (third millennium) people of Mesopotamia called the
Sumerians. They expressed their language in written form by
pressing the triangular ends of reeds cut from the Tigris and
Euphrates river-banks into soft clay. Modern scholars call this
script‘cuneiform’, after the Latin wordcuneusfor wedge, because
of the wedge-like shapes produced by this process. And the script
thus created was widely adopted by many civilisations, including
the Hittite civilisation, throughout the Near Eastern world for
several millennia to come.
So the unknown script on the Hattusa tablets could literally be
read, or sounded out, even though the language they recorded was
still unintelligible. Then the famous breakthrough! As he was
perusing the texts, Hrozny came across a sentence which when
transliterated into letters of our own alphabet read:nuNINDA-an
ezzatteni watar-ma ekutteni. Now, NINDA was an old Sumerian
REDISCOVERING A LOST WORLD 13