Attested in cuneiform, hieroglyphic and alphabetic texts dating to the first two millennia BCE, the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family is intriguing already by itself. But... Show moreAttested in cuneiform, hieroglyphic and alphabetic texts dating to the first two millennia BCE, the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family is intriguing already by itself. But Anatolian is also of central importance for the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European, the last common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Not only is it the earliest attested branch, it has also long been suspected that Anatolian reflects an earlier stage of the proto-language than that underlying the rest of the family.Focusing on the three best-attested Anatolian languages, Hittite, Luwian and Lycian, this book aims to further our understanding of Anatolian, and by extension Proto-Indo-European, by offering in-depth analyses of essential issues in Anatolian historical morphology and semantics. Various well-known as well as several newly adduced topics are scrutinized to determine whether the innovations leading to the discrepancies with the rest of Indo-European took place on the Anatolian or on the non-Anatolian side.The present study suggests that Anatolian is in many respects closer to the ancestor of the other Indo-European languages than is often claimed. Nevertheless, the investigation has also led to new evidence in favor of the hypothesis that Anatolian was the first branch to split off from the family. Show less
This article discusses one of the main problems of the Zalpa-text, namely that its mythological part deals with the relations between Zalpa and Nēša, but leaves Ḫattuša unmentioned, whereas its... Show moreThis article discusses one of the main problems of the Zalpa-text, namely that its mythological part deals with the relations between Zalpa and Nēša, but leaves Ḫattuša unmentioned, whereas its historical part deals with the relations between Zalpa and Ḫattuša, but contains no reference to Nēša. Following Martínez’ 2016 suggestion that in the text’s historical part Ḫattuša does not have the function of capital of the kings who feature in this story, but is merely used as a military base for the campaigns against Zalpa, it will be argued that during the historical events described in the Zalpa-text these kings in fact ruled from Nēša. A major consequence of this interpretation is that Nēša was the capital during the reigns of the early Hittite kings Ḫuzzii̯a I and Labarna I and also that Ḫattušili I ascended the throne there before he moved his court to Ḫattuša. Show less
