The Bogazkoy archives are a collection of texts found on the site of the capital of the Hittite state, the city of

Hattusas Hattusa (also Ḫattuša or Hattusas ; Hittite: URU''Ḫa-at-tu-ša'', Turkish: Hattuşaş , Hattic: Hattush) was the capital of the Hittite Empire in the late Bronze Age. Its ruins lie near modern Boğazkale, Turkey, within the great loop of ...

(now Bogazkoy in

Turkey Turkey ( tr, Türkiye ), officially the Republic of Türkiye ( tr, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, links=no ), is a transcontinental country located mainly on the Anatolian Peninsula in Western Asia, with a small portion on the Balkan Peninsula ...

). They are the oldest extant documents of the state, and they are believed to have been created in the

2nd millennium BC The 2nd millennium BC spanned the years 2000 BC to 1001 BC. In the Ancient Near East, it marks the transition from the Middle to the Late Bronze Age. The Ancient Near Eastern cultures are well within the historical era: The first half of the mil ...

. The archive contains approximately 25,000 tablets.

Content

The archive contains royal annals, treaties, political correspondence, legal texts, inventory texts along with instructions, texts related to administration, mythological texts, and religious texts.''Cem'' p.1

Language

Most tablets were found to be written in the

Hittite language Hittite (natively / "the language of Neša", or ''nešumnili'' / "the language of the people of Neša"), also known as Nesite (''Nešite'' / Neshite, Nessite), is an extinct Indo-European language that was spoken by the Hittites, a peopl ...

. However, some of the tablets are written in

Hurrian The Hurrians (; cuneiform: ; transliteration: ''Ḫu-ur-ri''; also called Hari, Khurrites, Hourri, Churri, Hurri or Hurriter) were a people of the Bronze Age Near East. They spoke a Hurrian language and lived in Anatolia, Syria and Norther ...

, and a few paragraphs of the tablets are written in Hattic.

Akkadian Akkadian or Accadian may refer to: * Akkadians, inhabitants of the Akkadian Empire * Akkadian language, an extinct Eastern Semitic language * Akkadian literature, literature in this language * Akkadian cuneiform Cuneiform is a logo-syllabic ...

is also a common language, though it is mashed with Hurrian and Hittite. Another language found in the texts is

Assyrian Assyrian may refer to: * Assyrian people, the indigenous ethnic group of Mesopotamia. * Assyria, a major Mesopotamian kingdom and empire. ** Early Assyrian Period ** Old Assyrian Period ** Middle Assyrian Empire ** Neo-Assyrian Empire * Assyri ...

. Given that the writing is mostly in

cuneiform Cuneiform is a logo- syllabic script that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Middle East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. It is named for the characteristic wedge- ...

, there are

Sumerogram A Sumerogram is the use of a Sumerian cuneiform character or group of characters as an ideogram or logogram rather than a syllabogram in the graphic representation of a language other than Sumerian, such as Akkadian or Hittite. Sumerograms are n ...

s interspersed throughout the texts regardless of language.

Discovery

The Bogazkoy Archives were discovered in 1906 by

Hugo Winckler Hugo Winckler (4 July 1863 – 19 April 1913) was a German archaeologist and historian who uncovered the capital of the Hittite Empire (Hattusa) at Boğazkale, Turkey. A student of the languages of the ancient Middle East, he wrote extensi ...

and

Theodore Makridi Theodore Makridi Bey (1872–1940) was an Ottoman and Turkish - Greek archaeologist who conducted the first excavations of the Hittite capital, Hattusas Hattusa (also Ḫattuša or Hattusas ; Hittite: URU''Ḫa-at-tu-ša'', Turkish: Hattuşa� ...

Studying

* Hans Ehelohf wrote "Hans Ehelohf and the Bogazköy Archive in Berlin" after years of studying and translating. * Hans Gustav Güterbock studied the archive and wrote multiple books about it for over 60 years.

References

Clay tablets Hittite texts

Bibliography

* {{Cite book, last=Karusu, first=Cem, url=https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ad99/c3808dfa60a416747a678eabac4fb999c19f.pdf, title=Some remarks on archive-library/Systems of hattusa-yîoğazköy, year=1996 , doi=10.1501/Archv_0000000039, s2cid=195978847, via=

Semantic Scholar Semantic Scholar is an artificial intelligence–powered research tool for scientific literature developed at the Allen Institute for AI and publicly released in November 2015. It uses advances in natural language processing to provide summaries ...