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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

"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.

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?

Are there any complaints about the quality of copper?

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.

this blog just restates the article it links

> 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.

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.

"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

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/

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

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

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