The Coming of the Greeks. Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East

The Coming of the Greeks

tolian was a rampant innovator could be a supplement rather

than an alternative to the Indo-Hittite hypothesis. That San-

skrit, Greek, and Latin have much more in common with each

other than any of the three has with Hittite might in fact be

most easily explained by a combination of the two hypotheses:

(i) at a very early date, a single linguistic trunk divided into

two, one of which was to evolve into Proto-Anatolian, the

other into Proto-Indo-European, and (2) the Proto-Anatolian

trunk was much more susceptible to innovation than was the

Proto-Indo-European trunk or any of its eventual branches.

However Proto-Anatolian came to be what it was, at the end

of the third millennium many of the people in Hatti, or central

Anatolia, spoke a (or the) Proto-Anatolian language, although

they perhaps also spoke something else. The evidence for

Proto-Anatolian speakers in Hatti at this time comes in the

form of Proto-Anatolian personal names, and a few loan-words,

in the tablets of Assyrian merchants resident at Kiiltepe, a

hundred miles south of Boghazkoy. In 1900 B.C., however,

people whose first language was Proto-Anatolian were a minor-

ity in the Kiiltepe area, where the traditional language of the

cult centers was Hattic, a language that (unlike the Proto-An-

atolian languages) has no relation to Indo-European. 9 In Hatti,

9. Although no inscriptions in Hattic have been found anywhere
   (presumably Hattic speakers never became literate in their language), the
   number of Hattic-looking names in the Kiiltepe tablets is considerable. In a
   close study of the personal names and the place names in the tablets,
   E. Bilgic; ("Die Ortsnamen der 'kappadokischen' Urkunden im Rahmen der
   alten Sprachen Anatoliens," Archiv fur Orientfonchung 15 [1945—1951]: I—

37. found that most of the names appeared to be either Hattic or character-
    istic of the pre-Luwian language of southern and southwest Asia Minor, and
    that a minority were Hittite or Hurrian. In one and the same family, how-
    ever, names belonging to several of the language communities were at-
    tested, and often a single personal name or place name combined elements
    from two languages. As for the principal language of ancient Kiiltepe,
    Bilgic;, declared (p. 17) a non liquet: "Welche Sprache in dieser gemischten
    Bevolkerung zur Zeit der Handelskolonie gesprochen wurde, la'sst sich dem
    unzureichenden Material nicht entnehmen."