HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Hittite is a member of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European family, and the earliest attested Indo-European language. Anatolian is generally regarded as the first branch to have separated from the other Indo-European languages. Aside from Hittite it includes Luvian (Cuneiform and Hieroglyphic) and Palaic, all from the second millennium BC, and Hieroglyphic Luvian, Lycian, Lydian, and the scantily attested Carian, Pisidian, and Sidetic in the first millennium BC.

The speakers of Hittite were in place in Central Anatolia by the nineteenth–eighteenth century BC, since a few words of the language (notably išḫiul- “contract”) appear in Old Assyrian documents from the merchant colonies like Kārum Kaneš, Hittite Nešaš, modern Kültepe. As an Old Hittite origin legend shows (Otten 1973), the Hittites regarded this city as their original home; it is the base of their designation of their own language, URUnišili, nešumnili “in Hittite,” literally “in the language of (the inhabitants of) Nešaš.” With the beginning of our documentation of the language proper we distinguish Old Hittite (seventeenth or early sixteenth century–c. 1500), Middle Hittite (c. 1500–c. 1375), and Neo-Hittite (c. 1375–c. 1200). Adherents of the “short chronology” would lower these dates somewhat, particularly at the upper end.

Speakers of what was to be the Anatolian branch of the Indo–European family apparently migrated into Asia Minor, probably from the Balkans across the Bosporus, in the course of the third millennium BC.