Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/04/04
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 07:48 PM 4/4/2001 -0700, S Dimitrov wrote: >While we were busy publicly eviscerating ourselves at the >chalkboard, he would sit back in the first row thumbing through a >monograph of Hittite inscriptions. I always wondered about the >connection. There is a dual reason to be fascinated by the Hittites, historic and linguistic. The Hittites appear out of nowhere into Anatolia in the mid-Bronze Age, roughly 2200 BC. They conquer and rule a native Caucasian people who called themselves "Hatti". Although the newcomers actually called themselves "nes", the older name of the conquered people continued to denote them through their existence. The Hittites were aggressive intruders into the business of everyone in their neighborhood and maintained relatively complete records which have, in large part, survived. Hence, we can learn much both about the organization of their own nation and their relations with others. For instance, the Hittite records refer to the Mycenaean Greeks, which allows us independent verfication of their importance. The Hittites are overthrown around 1200 BC in the same set of disasters which saw the end of Homeric Greek culture and the advent of the Hellenic Dark Ages. From a linguistic angle, Hittite is fascinating in that it is the oldest Indo-European language which has left readable remains. With Luwain, early Sanskrit, and Mycenean Greek, we thus have a snapshot of the state of linguistic affairs relatively soon after the division of the Indo-European languages around 4000 BC. Even better, the Anatolian Group, to which Hittite belongs, was extremely conservative and represents a language which has a number of characteristics which teach us a lot about Primitive Indo-European. A good discussion of this can be found in JP Mallory, IN SEARCH OF THE INDO-EUROPEANS (London: Thames & Hudson, 1989, ISBN: 0-500-27616-1). Significantly less user-friendly, but still interesting, is Andrew L Sihler, NEW COMPARATIVE GRAMMAR OF LATIN AND GREEK (Oxford: OUP, 1995, ISBN: 0-19-508345-8). The on-topic connection, of course, is that we are now discovering fossilized Leica Cassettes in Hittite burial mounds, together with decayed elements which have been tentatively identified as ROM contacts. Archaeologists have resorted to the latest scientific approaches, of course, and SHARPO (TM) is being employed to restore these items to their full operational condition. I would suspect Ted Grant, as a survivor of this era, could provide even further light on the subject but, alas!, he no longer resides in Anatolia and has, thus, escaped the knowledge of these sleuths poring over the middin fields of what is now central Turkey. Marc msmall@roanoke.infi.net FAX: +540/343-7315 Cha robh bas fir gun ghras fir!