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

  • 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.
  • > 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 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.

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