Archaeologists discover previously unknown ancient language – The Independent

2023/11/16 Leave a comment

Fascinating:

Archaeological research in the Middle East is revealing how a long-forgotten ancient civilisation used previously undiscovered linguistics to promote multiculturalism and political stability.

The ground-breaking discoveries are also shedding new light on how early empires functioned.

Ongoing excavations in Turkey – in the ruins of the ancient capital of the Hittite empire – are yielding remarkable evidence that the imperial civil service included entire departments fully or partly dedicated to researching the religions of subject peoples.

The evidence suggests that, back in the second millennium BC, Hittite leaders told their civil servants to record subject peoples’ religious liturgies and other traditions by writing them down in their respective local languages (but in Hittite script) – so that those traditions could be preserved and incorporated into the empire’s highly inclusive multicultural religious system.

So far, modern experts on ancient languages have discovered that Hittite civil servants preserved and recorded religious documents from at least five subject ethnic groups.

The latest example was unearthed just two months ago. It turned out to be written in a previously unknown Middle Eastern language that had been lost for up to 3,000 years.

Over the decades, around 30,000 complete and fragmentary clay tablet documents have been unearthed in the ruins of the ancient Hittite capital – Hattussa (now known as Bogazkoy) around 100 miles east of modern Turkey’s capital, Ankara.

The great majority were written in the empire’s main language – Hittite. But the Hittite government’s scribes wrote around 5 per cent of them fully or partly in the languages of the empire’s minority ethnic groups – peoples like the Luwians (south-eastern Anatolians), Palaians (from part of north-west Anatolian), Hattians (central Anatolians) and Hurrians (from Syria and northern Mesopotamia).

The most recently discovered minority language, recorded by government scribes (and previously unknown to modern scholars) is being called Kalasmaic – because it seems to have been spoken by a subject people in an area called Kalasma on the empire’s northwestern fringe.

The discovery suggests that even the most obscure languages in the empire were being recorded, studied and preserved in written form. That in turn raises the possibility that other small previously unknown Middle Eastern languages will be discovered, recorded on Hittite imperial clay tablets, in the particular series of ancient scriptoria that the archaeologists are currently excavating at Bogazkoy.

The empire’s civil service scribes wrote all their manuscripts in a Hittite version of a pre-existing Mesopotamian-originating script (the oldest writing system in the world) called cuneiform, consisting of wedge-shaped lines arranged in groups representing syllables.

The area of the Middle East which is now Turkey was, in ancient times, particularly rich in languages.

Linguistic diversity often depends on topography. The more mountains and isolated valley systems, the more languages are likely to develop and survive.

At present only five minority languages are known from the Bronze Age Hittite empire – but in reality, given the mountainous topography, there may well have been at least 30

Indeed, just adjacent to the ancient Hittite Empire were the Caucasus mountains region which still today boasts some 40 languages.

The Hittite language is the world’s oldest attested Indo-European tongue.

The earliest inscriptions date from the 16th century BC. As an Indo-European language, it is related to most modern European languages (including English) as well as many Asian languages (including Iranian and many Indian ones). Indeed, despite the 3,000-year time gap, ancient Hittite and modern English have dozens of words in common.

Watar was for instance Hittite for “water”. Duttar was the main part of the Hittite word for “daughter”. “Wine” was wiyana, while card was “heart/cardiac” and newa was their word for “new”.

The excavations of the ancient scriptoria in Bogazkoy will allow linguistics experts to better understand the evolution of ancient Bronze Age Indo-European languages that English is distantly related to.

The current excavations are being directed by professor Andreas Schachner of the German Archaeological Institute in Istanbul – with the study of the texts on the clay tablets being undertaken by paleo-linguists from Wurzburg and Istanbul universities.

“Bronze Age Middle Eastern history is only partly understood – and discovering additional clay tablet documents is helping scholars to substantially increase our knowledge,” said cuneiform script expert, Wurzburg University professor Daniel Schwemer, who is leading the investigation into the newly discovered texts.

The excavations at Bogazkoy are currently yielding between 30 and 40 new cuneiform tablets or tablet fragments every year. Bogazkoy (ancient Hattusa) is particularly important because, as the centre of the Hittite empire (around 1650 BC to 1200 BC), it was the capital of one of the world’s first half dozen really large imperial political systems. It was therefore home to one of the world’s first really substantial document-producing civil services.

The Hittite empire stretched from the Aegean Sea in the west to what is now northern Iraq in the east and from the Black Sea in the north to Lebanon in the south.

Source: Archaeologists discover previously unknown ancient language – The Independent

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ICYMI: Safeguarding Islam’s past for future generations – BBC News

2017/05/27 Leave a comment

Worth noting (but uneven, as Saudi Arabia’s development of Mecca and Medina illustrates):

A recent conference in Bahrain brought together experts in Islamic archaeology to discuss the lessons of the past and how to safeguard Muslim heritage for future generations.

Under the blistering Bahraini sun archaeologist Salman Al Mahari and his team are excavating a section on the western side of the Al-Khamis mosque site.

With its twin minarets the mosque used to act as a landmark for ships at sea guiding them to land in the 14th century.

But today, excavating the mosque has a far more important function as Islamic archaeology takes on the extremists at their own game.

At a recent conference in Manama, the capital of Bahrain, archaeologists working in over 14 Islamic countries around the world participated in a first of its kind conference.

Islamic Archaeology in Global Perspective brought together some of the most distinguished scholars working in the field of Islamic archaeology to share first hand their recent practical experience in countries torn apart by war, and to investigate the various influences on the science of archaeology.

New Zealander, Alan Walmsley, Professor of Islamic Archaeology and Art at the University of Copenhagen says his investigations aim to disseminate a fuller account of social, cultural, and economic developments in Arab and Islamic history. “I interrogate faded and misinformed historical narratives,” he explains.

He begins by unpicking past Western interest in Bilad Al-Sham, an historic region of the Middle East known as Greater Syria.

“Islamic discoveries were incidental to the objective of archaeological interest in Greater Syria,” he says.”The focus of digs were on the Biblical, Hellenistic and Classical past. These earlier periods took precedence in research.”

VolubilisImage copyrightRICHARD DUEBEL
Image captionThe site of Volubilis in Morocco is a Roman and Islamic site

Animosity between Islam and the West compounded the lack of interest in Muslim remains according to Alastair Northedge, professor at the Universites de Paris 1.

He spoke in the context of his recent trip to Iraq, about the West’s overwhelming concerns with their own past. “There is quite a good example in Iraq,” he says. “Babylon seems to belong to the West.”

Corisande Fenwick, a lecturer in Archaeology of the Mediterranean at University College London (UCL) took time to describe painstaking research into food remains indicating when pork was no longer consumed and so revealing the pace at which Islam was established across the Maghreb region.

She attributes the Western assessment of archaeological finds prior to the mid-1950s to a colonial interpretation.

“If you go back before independence, archaeology is all driven by colonial scholars,” she says.

“They were attracted by the exotic nature of their finds. That reinforced the idea that the Islamic world was somehow different and needed to be controlled by colonial powers,” she adds.

But it is not just a Western agenda that has shaped excavations in the Muslim world. Alastair Northedge also notes that Muslims themselves have not always been concerned with protecting the material heritage of the great spiritual sanctuaries.

“It is not just Mecca and Medina, but also Shia shrines in Najaf and Karbala in Iraq” he says.

“There seems to be a preference for building something new rather than conserving the old because the emphasis is on the spiritual nature of these places not their materiality.”

But a wider vision is coming and the rise in the number of excavations throughout the Gulf area attests to a burgeoning interest in the material past. St John Simpson, archaeologist and senior curator at the British Museum, says that a revival of interest in Islamic archaeology is long overdue.

“It’s part and parcel of a search for Muslim cultural identity,” he explains. It is also an opportunity to redress earlier misconceptions.

“Since the 19th century and continuing though much of the 20th century commercial excavations led by dealers have in parts of the world flooded the market with objects which were traditionally celebrated by art historians,” Dr Simpson says. “They celebrated the beauty of those pieces and therefore reconstructed material cultures on the basis of those objects.”

Source: Safeguarding Islam’s past for future generations – BBC News

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