provided the key to reading and understanding the thousands of
tablets and tablet-fragments inscribed in this language, found by
the German excavators in the Hittite capital.
But we should not continue before giving credit to an earlier
scholar who had identified the language as Indo-European a
decade and a half earlier. Among the Amarna tablets, there were
two pieces of corrrespondence exchanged between the pharaoh
and a king of a country called Arzawa in Anatolia. Unlike the great
majority of the Amarna tablets, they were written not in Akkadian,
but in a then unknown language. In 1902, the Norwegian scholar
J. A. Knudtzon, while not being able to translate the letters,
declared that their language was an Indo-European one. Of course,
he did not know then that it was the language of the Hittites. For at
that time the Hittites were only just re-emerging from 3,000 years
of almost total obscurity. Alas, Knudtzon failed to have the courage
of his convictions. He gave way before sustained howls of protests
from his scholarly contemporaries. The idea was ridiculous, they
declared. After all, practically all the known languages of the age
belonged to the Semitic language family–like Akkadian, and later
languages like Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic. It was absurdly far-
fetched to suggest that a language related to Latin and Greek and
English and French and so on could possibly have emerged in this
part of the world so early in its history. So Knudtzon buckled
under pressure and gave up his proposal, and Hrozny had to start
all over again.
REDISCOVERING A LOST WORLD 15