CHAPTER 2

How Do The

Hittites Tell Us

About Themselves?

READING THE ANCIENT SCRIPTS

W

ith Hrozny the curtain began to be drawn aside to
reveal the ancient Hittites, and what they tell us about
themselves and the world they inhabited. Let’s explore
this world. Butfirst we need to say something about the tablets, the
cuneiform script written on them, the writers of the script and
where the records they made were kept. By far the majority of these
records were written on a readily available material – clay, the
main writing material used in the Near Eastern world at least as far
back as the fourth millennium.
With just one later main exception, the Sumerian script and all
subsequent cuneiform scripts were syllabic. That is to say, each
symbol, or group of symbols, represented a syllable. This could be a
vowel on its own, a consonantþvowel, a vowelþconsonant,
a consonantþvowelþ consonant, or occasionally a vowelþ
consonantþvowel. Sometimes a group of symbols could represent
a whole word like‘god’or‘king’or‘land’or‘city’. In Sumerian,
these words were pronounced DINGIR, LUGAL, KUR and URU
respectively. Modern scholars call them logograms. Sometimes,
logograms were used purely to identify the nature of the word they
immediately preceded. In these cases, we call them‘determinatives’.