HITTITE LANGUAGE

most important of the extinct Indo-European languages of Anatolia; it was closely related to Luwian, Lydian, Lycian, and Palaic. Hittite is known primarily from the approximately 25,000 cuneiform tablets or fragments of tablets preserved in the archives of Bogazky (the ancient Hattusa, in modern Turkey), the majority of which are from the period of the Hittite empire (c. 1400c. 1190 BC) and are concerned with religious and other subjects. Old Hittite texts, from about 1650 to 1595 BC, are preserved in copies from the empire period and are the earliest Indo-European texts that have thus far been found. Bedrich Hrozn, a Czech Orientalist, concluded in 1915 that Hittite was an Indo-European language because of the similarity of its endings for nouns and verbs to those of other early Indo-European languages. Hittite has provided significant information about the early Indo-European sound system.