YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Hittite royal archive found in Turkey

384 points benbreen 4 days ago 100 comments

sherr 4 days ago | parent

The History Blog is a small gem because it is serious and not sensational. Always with a good level of detail for the average interested visitor, and from the original (or close by) sources. Plus pictures.

pluc 4 days ago | parent

And they support RSS! Albeit through WordPress but nobody's perfect

ekjhgkejhgk 4 days ago | parent

What's wrong with WordPress?

pluc 4 days ago | parent

How much time you got?

20after4 4 days ago | parent

It may be easier to answer what isn't wrong with it. Actually no, I can't think of anything that's right with it.

alsetmusic 4 days ago | parent

Its CEO acts like a child and is abusive towards other orgs.

Matl 4 days ago | parent

> CEO acts like a child

Applies to most of them.

jagged-chisel 4 days ago | parent

RSS is RSS. Does it matter to a client how it’s generated?

tyromaniac 4 days ago | parent

Depends how snooty and insufferable the client is :p

Anon84 3 days ago | parent

I, for one, only generate RSS using a magnetic needle and a steady hand

rglynn 3 days ago | parent

Not using butterflies?

https://xkcd.com/378/

Anon84 2 days ago | parent

Nah, I was never an emacs guy

throw0101c 4 days ago | parent

> And they support RSS! Albeit through WordPress but nobody's perfect

As well as Atom, though there's no <link> for it in the HTML:

* https://www.thehistoryblog.com/feed/atom

* https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=https%3A%2F%2Fww...

alsetmusic 4 days ago | parent

I wouldn’t have thought to check, so I greatly appreciate you mentioning this. Added to my feed in the category (literally) Nerd Blogs. I love history, so you’ve made my day.

einpoklum 4 days ago | parent

What artifacts are we leaving which will allow people in 3400 years to get a glimpse of daily events in our lives?

Digital information and toner/ink on paper will not last nearly that long.

Maybe humans of this age should be curating some etching on stone or even more durable materials, to record some of our history for posterity?

rantallion 4 days ago | parent

Isn't that one of the driving forces behind research like Project Silica? Sure, it won't capture everything that everyone produces, but the 'important stuff' can be preserved for millennia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage

b112 4 days ago | parent

We have those CDs made of stone we could use! That's sorta a stone .. thing.

IAmBroom 4 days ago | parent

The data is preserved in plastic, which is (so far) a less-digestible hydrocarbon than wood (paper) and skin (vellum).

So, intermediary at best. My understanding is that R/W CDs are far less durable than earlier write-once CDs, but probably far less common for mass storage.

b112 4 days ago | parent

https://blog.hagerman.com/written-in-stone-m-disc-technology...

IAmBroom 2 days ago | parent

Thank you! That is a great write-up!

In the early 1990s I worked for a CD foundry. We mostly made CD backups of nuclear plant records, and short runs of off-brand music. The resist dye got EVERYWHERE, because humans spill things; red blotches on everyone's work shoes.

If those "3 year" predictions meant anything, half of our business would have gone for tape backups.... Don't know if it's accurate, of course.

b112 2 days ago | parent

No worries re: link.

And for predicting things, it's been a decade since I bought a computer with a disc reader of any sort.

I thought they'd last forever, decades anyhow, but I wonder now. What good are stone cds, if there are no readers in 50 years.

The CD foundry job must have had fun moments.

jopsen 4 days ago | parent

They can just ask you, you'll live on in the weights of the future models.

un-diletante 4 days ago | parent

I wonder if Claude will descend into hell to rescue the poor souls of those who died before it's coming, patiently awaiting digitization in the bosom of Turing.

vegnus 4 days ago | parent

i have a mouth and am screaming

einpoklum 3 days ago | parent

I try to avoid conversion with LLMs. But I suppose they can always crawl my HN comments.

wl 4 days ago | parent

We've already seen this happen in the land of cuneiform. In the first millennium BCE, Akkadian cuneiform on tablets was replaced by Aramaic written on papyrus and vellum. The cuneiform survives in large quantity, the Aramaic barely at all. The Story of Aḥiqar, for example, comes from Mesopotamia and the only copy that survives in the original language somehow found its way to Elephantine in Egypt where the climate allowed it to (barely) survive. It puts Assyriologists in a weird position where there's plenty of textual documentation of earlier eras but far, far less in later eras. We're left with odd situations like the best documentation we have of Nebuchadnezzar II's reign coming from the Bible because the Bible got copied and the Babylonian texts that might provide a different emic perspective did not.

tourmalinetaco 4 days ago | parent

That’s not really an “odd” situation, though. That’s kind of just how it goes. The culturally important texts like the Bible get copied and spread, but who cares about the government’s documentation? Literally no one, unfortunately. Preservation within the historical record is in large part a mix of media used and popularity; a popular text can afford to be written on less durable materials, but using those less durable materials for unpopular documents? And they’ll be lost over time.

wl 4 days ago | parent

It is odd here because the surviving records are so much better when you go even a little bit further in the past. Compare Sennacherib's siege of Jerusalem under King Hezekiah a century or so earlier. We have Judah's side of things recorded in Isaiah, II Kings, and Chronicles. We have Sennacherib's side of things recorded in his royal annals. When Nebuchadnezzar II actually succeeded in conquering Jerusalem a century later, we just have the Bible.

mcswell 3 days ago | parent

"The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to develop a contemporary version of the historic Rosetta Stone. Run by the Long Now Foundation, the project aims to create a survey and near-permanent archive of 1,500 languages that can enable comparative linguistic research and education and might help recover or revitalize lost languages in the future." --from the Wikipedia description of the Rosetta Project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Project

solyin 3 days ago | parent

It's not quite that, but GitHub put a bunch of source code on ice for preservation.

> The GitHub Arctic Code Vault is a long-term data preservation project that stores open-source software code deep inside the Arctic World Archive in Svalbard, Norway.

https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/

flowerthoughts 4 days ago | parent

> This year’s excavation unearthed 131 cuneiform tablets and fragments which record an epidemic of fever, military logistics, religious practices and events of royal daily life 3,400 years ago.

Nice time machine you've got there. Not just vases and bones, but thoughts and societal complexities.

wl 4 days ago | parent

My Hittite language class went online during COVID and switched from studying royal annals to the Plague Prayers of Muršili II. One of the most enlightening parts of studying the ancient world is seeing that even in very alien cultures separated by millennia, we're all just people.

pfdietz 4 days ago | parent

In the case of the Assyrian rulers, really terrible people.

BigTTYGothGF 4 days ago | parent

Well yeah, they were kings.

pfdietz 4 days ago | parent

They come across as evil even compared to other kings.

MomsAVoxell 3 days ago | parent

Why, in particular?

pfdietz 3 days ago | parent

Skinning defeated enemies alive, for example, and celebrating that in pictures on victory stellae/carvings.

They made a lot of enemies who finally, when the empire was weakened by internal troubles, ganged together to destroy it.

tourmalinetaco 4 days ago | parent

My favorite piece of this will always be the Pompeii bathroom graffiti, with all the usual suspects. Guys really are dudes and it’s a beautiful thing.

TedDoesntTalk 3 days ago | parent

FOR A GOOD TIME CALL CORNELIA L. VIA APPIA 5258

idoubtit 4 days ago | parent

This article rephrases and shortens the original article: https://www.dailysabah.com/life/hittite-royal-archive-with-1...

dizhn 4 days ago | parent

Ah Erdoğan's west facing mouthpiece.

schleck8 4 days ago | parent

The Hittites were one of the largest empires in the ancient world, but up until the last two centuries, the only proper documentation of them was in the Bible, which is why many historians suspected that they were a fictional civilization.

In 1834, French archaelogist Texier found the ruins of their capital Hattusa in modern day Turkey. But he assumed it was Pteria, a city mentioned in ancient Greek documents.

It took another ~ 70 years for German archaelogist Winckler to realize that this was the Hittite capital, based on clay tablets.

wl 4 days ago | parent

The Bible is not proper documentation of the Hittites. All the texts that mention the Hittites post-date the fall of the empire based out of Ḫattuša by centuries. It's an open question whether the Hittites of the Bible refer to Ḫattuša or "Neo-Hittites" better described as Luwian-Aramean.

schleck8 4 days ago | parent

> All the texts that mention the Hittites post-date the fall of the empire based out of Ḫattuša by centuries

I don't see how this would invalidate the legitimacy of the documentation. The Hittites were large enough to be visible to contemporary historians and scriptures were used for information preserval. Even if our knowledge was only preserved through written documents, we'd have a good grasp of history 300 years ago, especially of major societies. People weren't primitive back then, they even had state archives with historical records which the Bible mentions in a few places for further reading.

wl 4 days ago | parent

We're talking about a Levantine Iron Age text discussing Bronze Age peoples where civilization collapsed in the interim. In the case of Ḫattuša, the state archives were almost certainly unreadable by the time the Biblical texts were written, evidenced by the lack of any Hittite cuneiform texts being produced or copied in the Iron Age. Egypt and Mesopotamia maintained texts and the ability to read those texts across the collapse. The same cannot be said about Syria-Anatolia and the Levant.

That isn't to say that the Biblical texts can't reflect a memory passed on through oral tradition or knowledge from Mesopotamia and Egypt. But given that the geography of the Hittites of the Bible seems to line up more with the later "Neo-Hittite" Luwian-Arameans than Ḫattuša and that the Bible doesn't seem to be aware of the empire of Ḫattuša, the Biblical Hittites are probably not Ḫattuša.

JumpCrisscross 3 days ago | parent

> 300 years ago

Try 500 to 700 years. (Hittites collapsed around 1200 BC, the Old Testament was penned between the 700s and 500s BC.)

adrian_b 2 days ago | parent

That is right but nonetheless the Old Testament includes material that was heavily edited and modified (to match both the conception of the editors about what is sinful and what is not, and also the political propaganda that was mandatory, i.e. that the Persians are the good guys while the Egyptians are the bad guys), whose origin was in much older stories, older by centuries and even millennia, e.g. the Gilgamesh Epic and other Babylonian literary works.

So some references from the Old Testament may correspond to people or places from many centuries earlier than the time when it was assembled, similarly to works like the Iliad and the Odyssey.

nautikos2 4 days ago | parent

This is not correct because we don't know what the Hittites called themselves. This civilization, when it was found, was named after the Biblical tribe. There is no relation established between the two.

adrian_b 3 days ago | parent

We know how they called their own language: "nešili", while they called "hattili" the language of the previous Non-Indo-European inhabitants of the place where the capital of the Hittite Empire was located. The "hattili" language does not have any certain affinities with other known languages, but it has some resemblances with certain North-Caucasian languages.

So the Hittites would better be called something like "Nessites".

Thus our name comes actually from the name of the people conquered by them (Hatti).

While the Hittites were originally identified with the people mentioned in the Bible, it is also possible that some or all of the references from the Bible are not to what we call Hittites, but to some "Hatti" people.

The Bible does not refer to the Hittite Empire but only to some people of Hittite origin that are encountered in the present territory of Israel, so they could have very well been of Hatti origin.

vegnus 4 days ago | parent

This is such incredible news! I was just wondering the other day if we are ever going to find more Bronze age writings. Such an endlessly fascinating time period

timcobb 4 days ago | parent

What about it?

vegnus 4 days ago | parent

I always found the Jaynes' Bicameral Mind theory interesting, hypothesizing essentially Bronze age peoples did not have conscious thought, but attributed their thoughts to gods speaking to them. It's probably not true, but it's kind of like an era that can only exist through mythology and legend. So when actual details are discovered, and a little bit of the darkness is lifted, I always find it interesting

pfdietz 4 days ago | parent

I always found it completely implausible, even outright ridiculous.

displayingnames 4 days ago | parent

Ong casts Jaynes as misunderstanding the oral-literate divide, which seems to me to be far more compelling.

mcswell 4 days ago | parent

There are plenty of illiterate people (and unwritten languages) in the world today, and they're quite self-aware. So even on this re-reading, Jaynes is wrong.

MomsAVoxell 3 days ago | parent

If we take literacy in this context to mean 'able to read and write and thus access history', then it should surely be understood that it is possible to be illiterate today while nevertheless 'osmosing' a lot of quasi-literate understanding of the world.

Whereas in the Bronze Age, they didn't have such devices as television, radio, cartoons, etc. - or at least, there was not as wide a distribution of illiterate-usable media among the illiterate then, as there are today.

mcswell 1 day ago | parent

True about the media, but I don't know what that has to do with the original post in this part of the thread, which was about Jaynes' "hypothesizing essentially Bronze age peoples did not have conscious thought."

vegnus 4 days ago | parent

It certainly downplays the achievements of those olden daysers

timcobb 4 days ago | parent

Thank you, yeah, it is very much a fascinating time.

Lumich 3 days ago | parent

« hypothesizing essentially Bronze age peoples did not have conscious thought, but attributed their thoughts to gods speaking to them »

The Mesoamerican advanced Stone Age peoples who had an ongoing encounter with the Spaniards certainly did have conscious thought, despite their gods. Why would Bronze Age peoples have been different in that respect?

cwnyth 3 days ago | parent

Jaynes' goes far beyond the Bronze Age, though. It's unfortunately a bit of claptrap. Read "A Man and His Ba" to see just how clearly Bronze Age man knew they had individual will.

MomsAVoxell 3 days ago | parent

I think it was not that they didn't have conscious thought, but that they had very few ways of describing that thought until there was an abundance of leisure and relative freedom.

I view this bicameral mind means of thinking, though, relatively banal - especially in the modern context where cultures are clashing over apparent willingness to consider each others consciousness, or not. I think there are plenty of examples of cultures in the modern era who deny each other conscious thought, even today, such that it justifies their wanton destruction.

The darkness lifting: I concur, it is always wonderful to gain insight into humans, past, through their own words. The interpretations of things over the aeons have put a distinct burl on the edges of our understanding; discoveries like this archive bring back the shine. The Hittites were real people, with normal human problems.

ajb 4 days ago | parent

"Another notable document is a letter from Hittite generals in western Anatolia appealing to the king for reinforcements in men, horses and chariots to fend off enemy forces. "

I had assumed they had to wait for clay to dry before it could be carried anywhere, which seems incompatible with using them for urgent military messages. I wonder if there was a way to transport them while soft, or if this was just the archival copy of a message sent by other means.

AnimalMuppet 4 days ago | parent

It's not like they had to wait for the clay to dry, and then sent the message via email over fiber optic cable. It would take days to reach the palace. Drying it (maybe in a small kiln?) first was a small part of the delay.

samudrijan 4 days ago | parent

Where do you think we get the expression clay pigeon? Earliest form of airmail…

ACS_Solver 4 days ago | parent

Most tablets were air dried, which would take a day or two. But some tablets were fired - dried in a kiln. I don't know about Hittites but at least in Mesopotamia, air drying was by far the most common method and only some important ones were fired. So methods were certainly available to dry a tablet quickly if necessary but I doubt if air drying delays made much of a difference. Messages and goods were limited to the speed of horse after all.

popol12 3 days ago | parent

Firing clay in a kiln also make it more water resistant, I believe

Cthulhu_ 3 days ago | parent

Write it, keep it on a stabilizing platform and start running - the clay will be dried after a few days of travel. Of course there's a risk that the message will get smudged but I'm sure they had ways and means to stabilize the message before it arrived.

What I wonder about is whether these tablets as they are found today were just air dried or if they were fired at all. I can imagine that they would get fired for archival purposes in the capital.

Telaneo 4 days ago | parent

Looking forward to seeing this expanding our understanding of the Hittite lexicon and its relationship with the rest of the Indo-European languages.

cmrdporcupine 4 days ago | parent

It looks like this is fairly late in Hittite's evolution, though, 14th century BCE.

Clarity about relationship with the rest of PIE would definitely be enhanced by having a corpus from substantially earlier on.

simonh 4 days ago | parent

We have some copies of royal correspondence found in Egypt, written on cuneiform tablets. They used them for messages to foreign kings because they're compact and durable. A lot of the surviving tablets are begging letters asking the Egyptians for gold. We even have some practice tablets from teaching Egyptian scribes to do this.

Anyway I think some of these documents are of communications with Hittite kings, so it would be great to get some instances of the "other side" of some of these letters.

palmotea 4 days ago | parent

> A lot of the surviving tablets are begging letters asking the Egyptians for gold. We even have some practice tablets from teaching Egyptian scribes to do this.

I'm imagining a class on "begging for gold" being given to young Egyptian scribes.

wl 4 days ago | parent

That would be Amarna Letters 41-44.

A quotation from a letter sent by Ankhesenamun, Tutankhamun's widow, to Hittite king Šuppiluliuma I was found in Ḫattuša. Ankhesenamun asked Šuppiluliuma to send her one of her sons to marry her and become king of Egypt. Šuppiluliuma initially thinks this is a ruse, but the story eventually checks out and Šuppiluliuma sends a son. That son is killed on his journey and a war between Egypt and Ḫattuša ensues.

01100011 4 days ago | parent

> One text tells of a fever epidemic that struck the infant daughter of the king. She was still a nursing baby when she became ill. She never recovered from the fever and her health declined precipitously until she passed away.

Wow, the infant daughter was nursing a baby? Were the Hittites like aphids which can be pregnant while still in the womb?

As much as I hate AI slop, sometimes I think people are better off leaving writing to robots.

neil_naveen 4 days ago | parent

The text says "a nursing baby," meaning the infant was being nursed, not that she was nursing a baby.

asveikau 3 days ago | parent

Seems like a fault of your English language parsing ability. Though deliberately misinterpreting grammar as you've done is a common type of joke that I appreciate.

Isamu 4 days ago | parent

I love that the comments on TFA include Unicode cuneiform, not images

jorblumesea 3 days ago | parent

This is really interesting because there's an active debate around who Tudhaliya II actually is and how the records overlap with Tudhaliya I. hopefully this will shed more light on early early new Hittite kingdom chronology.

boo_you 3 days ago | parent

this blog just restates the article it links

doormatt 3 days ago | parent

Are there any complaints about the quality of copper?