A New Anatolian Language, Called Kalasma, Is Discovered

Ancient Hittite records have revealed a previously unknown Anatolian language. It was probably spoken in or near the region indicated in red above. As the linked Language Log quotation of a press release from the researchers' institution explains:

An excavation in Turkey has brought to light an unknown Indo-European language. Professor Daniel Schwemer, an expert for the ancient near east from Würzburg, is involved in investigating the discovery.

The new language was discovered in the UNESCO World Heritage Site Boğazköy-Hattusha in north-central Turkey. This was once the capital of the Hittite Empire, one of the great powers of Western Asia during the Late Bronze Age (1650 to 1200 BC).

Excavations in Boğazköy-Hattusha have been going on for more than 100 years under the direction of the German Archaeological Institute. The site has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1986; almost 30,000 clay tablets with cuneiform writing have been found there so far. These tablets, which were included in the UNESCO World Documentary Heritage in 2001, provide rich information about the history, society, economy and religious traditions of the Hittites and their neighbours.

Yearly archaeological campaigns led by current site director Professor Andreas Schachner of the Istanbul Department of the German Archaeological Institute continue to add to the cuneiform finds. Most of the texts are written in Hittite, the oldest attested Indo-European language and the dominant language at the site. Yet the excavations of this year yielded a surprise. Hidden in a cultic ritual text written in Hittite is a recitation in a hitherto unknown language.

Professor Daniel Schwemer, head of the Chair of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Germany, is working on the cuneiform finds from the excavation. He reports that the Hittite ritual text refers to the new idiom as the language of the land of Kalašma. This is an area on the north-western edge of the Hittite heartland, probably in the area of present-day Bolu or Gerede.

The discovery of another language in the Boğazköy-Hattusha archives is not entirely unexpected, as Daniel Schwemer explains: "The Hittites were uniquely interested in recording rituals in foreign languages."

Such ritual texts, written by scribes of the Hittite king reflect various Anatolian, Syrian, and Mesopotamian traditions and linguistic milieus. The rituals provide valuable glimpses into the little known linguistic landscapes of Late Bronze Age Anatolia, where not just Hittite was spoken. Thus cuneiform texts from Boğazköy-Hattusha include passages in Luwian and Palaic, two other Anatolian-Indo-European languages closely related to Hittite, as well as Hattic, a non-Indo-European language. Now the language of Kalasma can be added to these.

Being written in a newly discovered language the Kalasmaic text is as yet largely incomprehensible. Daniel Schwemer’s colleague, Professor Elisabeth Rieken (Philipps-Universität Marburg), a specialist in ancient Anatolian languages, has confirmed that the idiom belongs to the family of Anatolian-Indo-European languages.

According to Rieken, despite its geographic proximity to the area where Palaic was spoken, the text seems to share more features with Luwian. How closely the language of Kalasma is related to the other Luwian dialects of Late Bronze Age Anatolia will be the subject of further investigation.

The Anatolian languages in the Indo-European language family are the least similar to other Indo-European language, which many linguists have interpreted as evidence of their deep time depth in the Indo-European language family. Some linguists have even suggested that the Indo-European languages have their origins in Anatolia and that their expansion from the Pontic Caspian steppe was a secondary migration. 

The linguists who take these positions are wrong. None of the other evidence is consistent with an old Indo-Anatolian languages hypothesis.

Instead, the Anatolian languages arrived in Anatolia from migrants ultimately derived from the Pontic Caspian steppe like Indo-European populations elsewhere. But they are relatively diverged from other Indo-European languages because the Copper Age Hattic society which the Hittites conquered and ultimately ruled, had far more staying power than the other societies were the Indo-European languages replaced Neolithic languages and Copper Age languages. The Hattic language survived as a liturgical language for many centuries after its speakers were conquered by the Hittites and it has far more substrate influence than other Neolithic substrate languages that Indo-European language experienced.

Also, the Hattic substrate language was itself greatly diverged from substrate languages descended from Western Anatolian Neolithic languages found in Europe (Basque is probably the sole living language descendant of this family of languages), whose more limited influence on the Indo-European languages of the people who conquered them was similar because the substrate languages had a common origin about two to three thousand years earlier. The early metal age Hattic people's language replaced the Neolithic languages of Anatolia when then migrated to this area from the highlands to its east.

Based on toponyms and personal names, however, it may have been related to the otherwise-unattested Kaskian language. Certain similarities between Hattic and both Abkhazo-Adyghean and Kartvelian languages have led to proposals by some scholars about the possibility of a linguistic bloc from central Anatolia to the Caucasus.

It seems likely that Minoan was also part of a linguistic macro-family that included Hattic, other Caucasian language families, and possibly other now extinct ergative languages of the region. 

Archaeological evidence, early historical written records from a Mesopotamian trading outpost at the south central fringe of Anatolia, and genetic evidence all support a late arrival of Anatolian languages to Anatolia (ca. 2000 BCE), followed by an adoption of the Anatolian languages there through language shift due to elite dominance of Hittite and other Anatolian language speakers, in part, due to their early superiority in metallurgy. They didn't leave much of a demic impact on the population of Anatolia, in stark contrast to the large scale male dominated demic near replacement seen in other areas where Indo-Europeans conquered territories whose Neolithic civilizations had collapsed due to serious climate events and soil exhaustion from their primitive agricultural methods.

The attested Indo-European language that was probably closest to proto-Indo-European (i.e.  the most basal attested Indo-European language) is Tocharian, which was spoken in the Tarim Basin for centuries by phenotypically and genetically West Eurasian peoples.

Proto-Indo-European languages probably originate in the Sredny Stog culture (ca. 4500 BCE to 3500 BCE), possibly fusing, on a more or less equal basis early herder languages of the Pontic Caspian steppe based upon Eastern hunter-gatherer languages of the region (possibly with some borrowing from Caucasian hunter-gather languages from whom they may have acquired some wives in a contact zone near the northern slope of the Caucasian mountains), with early Neolithic farmers on the frontier of farming at the time speaking a language derived from a Western Anatolian Neolithic language. The Khvalynsk culture of Western steppe herders (in the middle Volga region) and the Neolithic first farmers from the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture (centered in modern day Moldova and Western Ukraine) probably both contributed to the hybrid Sredny Stog culture that emerged in their contact zone. The nearby and roughly contemporaneous Cernavodă culture may have been another of the very earliest linguistically Indo-European societies. There are strong hints that the Sredny Stog culture was either the first to have domesticated the horse, or was one of the first cultures to have domesticated horses which were domesticated nearby.