THEME: Ancient Anatolia THEME ANATOLIAN ENIGMATIC ENTITY
The Hittites did not call themselves Hittite. The term is shorthand for one of three facets of the archaeology and ancient history of Late Bronze Age Anatolia. Hittite refers to a political phenomenon that emerged in the Land of Hatti in central Anatolia and ruled as one continuous dynasty from ca. 1650 to ca. 1180 BC. This political entity expanded from the Land of Hatti to subjugate neighbouring territories and peoples in the ‘Hittite empire’. ‘Hittite’ also identifies the mother tongue of this ruling dynasty, although the Hittites called this language Nesite. The Hittite language is recorded in tens of thousands of documents written in cuneiform script, mostly discovered in the Hittite capital Hattusa. Lastly, ‘Hittite’ is perhaps too casually used to describe a circumscribed or shared set of linguistic, stylistic, ideological, and behavioural practices and representations that broadly approximate a historical culture (e.g. Hittite religion, architecture, pottery, monuments).
Scholarship uses the word ‘Luwian’ more selectively. Like Hittite, it refers to a language the Hittites called . Hittite and Luwian are closely related languages in the now extinct Anatolian branch of Indo-European. Luwian was written in both the cuneiform documents of the Hittites and in a monumental script called ‘Hieroglyphic Luwian’. Luwian loan words frequently appear in the cuneiform sources in texts that are otherwise written in Hittite, so much so that some believe Luwian was developing into a lingua franca ofwritten in Luwian that record incantations and therapeutic rituals. Some scholars venture a Luwian religion because the names of many gods recorded in the Hittite sources have a distinct Luwian etymology, although little is understood of this pantheon and cosmology.
