logogram. This was a sign representing a single word which was
adopted without change in other cuneiform scripts written in
different languages. NINDA meant‘bread’–so it seemed that the
sentence was about food. ezza-(tteni)reminded Hrozny of the
Latin wordedoand the Germanessen, both of which mean‘eat’.
eku-(tteni)recalled the Latin wordaqua, suggesting that this word
had something to do with water. And most interestingly, the word
watar(-ma) recalled the German wordWasser, and the English
word‘water’. Hrozny concluded that ezzatteniandekutteniwere
second person plural verbs meaning‘eat’and‘drink’respectively.
And thus he read the sentence as a whole as‘You will eat bread and
drink water’.
But the real significance of hisfind was his conclusion from this
sentence that Hittite was a member of a very large language family
which we call Indo-European. Membership of the family covered
a wide range of tongues, both ancient and modern, including
Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, English, German and the modern romance
languages. Hittite was now established as the very earliest of these
languages preserved in written form. And Hrozny’s sentence
Figure 1.2 The key sentence.
14 WARRIORS OF ANATOLIA