A stone tablet containing text from a long-lost Indo-European language was discovered in Turkey in early 2023.
The tablet was uncovered during an annual expedition to the Boğazköy-Hattuşa UNESCO World Heritage Site in north-central Turkey, LiveScience reported. It’s believed the language carved into the tablet is some 3,000-years-old, and is written in cuneiform, one of the most ancient known scripts created by Sumerians more than 5,000 years ago.
A majority of the tablets unearthed at the site were written by the Hittites, who built their capital city in the region around 1,600 to 1,200 B.C., the outlet continued. Due to the time between the tablets being written and today, they’re found all over the site, which may have been an archive or library, researchers told LiveScience.
They were building? https://t.co/GsbwYGkB97
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) September 27, 2023
“The Hittites were uniquely interested in recording rituals in foreign languages,” Julius-Maximilians-University professor Daniel Schwemer said in a statement on the discovery. The words on this new tablet only start in the Hittite language, and appear to be describing what’s on the ancient tablet. (RELATED: Ancient Climate Crisis That Ended An Empire Discovered In The Strangest Place)
Analysis of the words have yet to reveal the innermost details of the tablet. And researchers are refusing to release photographs of it until it has been comprehensively studied (which I find super weird). All that’s been determined thus far is that the tablet likely comes from an Anatolian group of languages.