The Hittites

[The following post is extracted from a post written on April 14, 2010, but got lost in the shuffle in my drafts folder when its overambitious original scope got out of hand.  I am posting it now, retroactively, without modification to reflect new information, so that the sources and facts noted at the time are available for reference purposes.  Further edited for style and grammar on February 18, 2015.]

The Pre-Hittites

The capitol of the Hittite empire, where the first documents written in an Indo-European language are found, was Hattusa. Archaeological evidence shows that it was founded sometime between 5000 BCE and 6000 BCE, and Hittite history records the fact that it and the city of Nerik to the North of it, were founded by the non-Indo-European language speaking Hattic people who preceded them.

Both Hattsua and Nerik had been founded by speakers of the non-Indo-European, non-Semitic language called Hattic. Hattic shows similarities to both Northwest (e.g., Abkhaz) and South Caucasian (Kartvelian) languages, and was spoken sometime around the 3rd to 2nd milleniums BCE. The pre-Indo-European language spoken in Eastern Anatolia and the Zargov mountains, which also shows similarities to the languages of the Caucuses was Hurrian.

"Sacred and magical texts from Hattusa were often written in Hattic [and] Hurrian . . .even after Hittite became the norm for other writings." This is similar to the survival of Sumerian for religious purposes until around the 1st century BCE, despite the fact that it was replaced by the Semitic language Akkadian in general use roughly 1800 years earlier.

The Early Hittites

The first historical record of an Indo-European language is of Hittite in eastern Anatolia. An Indo-European Hittite language speaking dynasty dates back to at least 1740 BCE in a central Anatolian city (see generally here).

The Hittites called their own language the "language of Nesa," which is the name in Hittite of the ancient city of Kanesh, about 14 miles Northwest of the modern city of Kayseri in central Anatolia. This was an ancient Anatolian city, of pre-literate non-Indo-European language speaking farmers to which an Akkadian language speaking trading colony attached itself as a suburb for about two hundred years until around 1740 BCE.

Around 1740 BCE, the Assyrian culture ends and a Hittite culture appears in the archeological record, when the city was taken by Pithana, the first known Hittite king.

The Hittites of Nesa conquered this city from Kussara, which is believed to be between the ancient cities of Nesa and Aleppo (which was first occupied as a city around 5000 BCE), which continues to be a major city in Northern Syria also known as Halab. Their first king was described as the king of this one city-state.

His son, Anitta, sacked Hattsua around 1700 BCE and left the earliest known written Hittite inscription. Kanesh is closer to the source of the Red River than Hattsua, which would later become the Hittite capitol, and was ruled at the time of the sack by Hattic king Piyusti whom he defeated. The text of Anitta's inscription translates to:

Anitta, Son of Pithana, King of Kussara, speak! He was dear to the Stormgod of Heaven, and when he was dear to the Stormgod of Heaven, the king of Nesa [verb broken off] to the king of Kussara. The king of Kussara, Pithana, came down out of the city in force, and he took the city of Nesa in the night by force. He took the King of Nesa captive, but he did not do any evil to the inhabitants of Nesa; instead, he made them mothers and fathers. After my father, Pithana, I suppresed a revolt in the same year. Whatever lands rose up in the direction of the sunrise, I defeated each of the aforementioned.

Previously, Uhna, the king of Zalpuwas, had removed our Sius from the city of Nesa to the city of Zalpuwas. But subsequently, I, Anittas, the Great King, brought our Sius back from Zalpuwas to Nesa. But Huzziyas, the king of Zalpuwas, I brought back alive to Nesa. The city of Hattusas [tablet broken] contrived. And I abandoned it. But afterwards, when it suffered famine, my goddess, Halmasuwiz, handed it over to me. And in the night I took it by force; and in its place, I sowed weeds. Whoever becomes king after me and settles Hattusas again, may the Stormgod of Heaven smite him!

The capitol of the Hittites is moved to Hattsua within a century or two. The Hittites sacked Babylon around 1595 BCE.

The Hittites did not inhabit the North Black Sea plain of Anatolia to the Northeast, however. In this region, they were blocked by the Kaskians who make their first appearance three hundred years into the Hittite written record, around 1450 BCE, when they took the Hittite holy city of Nerik to the North of the then Hittite capitol of Hattsua. Less than a century before the Kaskians sacked the city of Nerik and moved to Anatolia, the Kaskians conquered the Indo-European Palaic language speaking people of Northwest Anatolia.

The Kaskians probably hailed from the Eastern shores of the sea of Marmara, which is the small sea between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.  The Kaskians continued to harry the Hittites for centuries, sacking Hattsua ca. 1280 BCE, although Hattsua was retaken as was the city of Nerik which they had again lost to the Kaskians. The Kaskians in an alliance with the Mushki people, toppled the Hittite empire around 1200 BCE, were then repulsed by the Assyrians, and appear to have migrated after being defeated by the Assyrians to the West Caucuses.

The Mushki were a people of Eastern Anatolia or the Caucuses, associated with the earliest history of state formation for Caucasian Georgia and Armenia. This suggests that they were likely non-Indo-European speakers, at least originally, although they may have adopted the local Luwian language of their subjects in Neo-Hittite kingdoms that arose after the fall of the Hittite empire in East Anatolia.

From about 1800 BCE to 1600 BCE, the city of Aleppo ruled the Kingdom of Yamhad based there and ruled by an Amorite dynasty.  The Amorites were a linguistically North Semitic people.  There had been Amorite dynasties in the same general region for two hundred years before then (i.e. since at least around 2000 BCE). This fell to the Hittites sometime in the following century (i.e. sometime between 1600 BCE and 1500 BCE) and was subsquently close to the boundary between the Egyptians to the Southwest, the Mesopotamian empires to the Southeast, and the Hittites to the North, for hundreds of years. There was a non-Indo-European Hurrian minority in Yamhad that exerted a cultural influence on the Kingdom and on its ruling Amorites who were a Semitic people whose language was probably ancestral to all of the Semitic languages (including Aramahic, Hebrew and Arabic), except Akkadian and language of Ebla, which is midway between Akkadian and the North Semitic language of the Amorites.

The Amorites a.k.a. the Mat.Tu were described as of sometime around the 21st century BCE as follows in Sumerian records (citing E. Chiera, Sumerian Epics and Myths, Chicago, 1934, Nos.58 and 112; E. Chiera, Sumerian Texts of Varied Contents, Chicago, 1934, No.3.)

The MAR.TU who know no grain.... The MAR.TU who know no house nor town, the boors of the mountains.... The MAR.TU who digs up truffles... who does not bend his knees (to cultivate the land), who eats raw meat, who has no house during his lifetime, who is not buried after death...

They have prepared wheat and gú-nunuz (grain) as a confection, but an Amorite will eat it without even recognizing what it contains!

In other words, the early pre-dynastic Amorites were probably nomadic herders.

The ancient Semitic city of Ebla was 34 miles southwest of Aleppo and was destroyed between 2334 BCE and 2154 BCE by an Akkadian king. It had a written language between Akkadian and North Semitic written from around 2500 BCE to 2240 BCE and was a merchant run town trading in wood and textiles whose residents also had a couple hundred thousand herd animals. The early Amorites were known to the people of Elba as "a rural group living in the narrow basion of the middle and upper Euphrates"(original source: Giorgio Bucellati, "Ebla and the Amorites", Eblaitica 3 (New York University) 1992:83-104), although Ebla would later become a subject kingdom of Yamhad.  The Akkadian kings campaigned against the Amorites following the fall of Ebla and recognized them as the main people to the West of their empire, whose other neighbors were the Subartu (probably Hurrians) to the Northeast, Sumer (in South Mesopotamia) and Elam (in the Eastern mountains).

The oldest Akkadian writing is found around 2600 BCE.

The Hittite, Mittani and Egyptians at 1400 BC

By around 1400 BCE, the Hittites ruled an area corresponding to the Red River (a.k.a. Kizilirmak basin) (map here citing Cambridge Ancient History Vol II Middle East & Aegean Region 1800-1300. I. E. S. Edwards (Ed) et al. as its source).

Adjacent to the Hittites to the Southeast, the Mittani empire, with commoners who spoke a non-Indo-European language called Hurrian and a ruling class that spoke an Indo-European language very close to Sanskrit, ruled the upper Euphrates and Tigris river valley about as far South as modern day Hadithah and Tikrit in Iraq. The Mittani also had a small piece of the Levant, extending Southwest to roughly the modern boundary between Turkey and Syria.

To the South of the Mittani in the East, the Kassite empire ruled the lower Euphrates and Tigris river valleys. The Kassites were a non-Indo-European Hurrian speaking people from the neighboring Zargos mountains to the East of the Mittani. The Kassites wrested power from the Akkadian empire.  The Akkadian empire, and its Semitic Akkadian language, in turn, had replaced the non-Indo-European, non-Semitic Sumerian language used before the Akkadian empire emerged.

To the Southwest of the Mittani were the Egyptians.  The Egyptian ruled from the Mittani boundary in the Levant to the greater Nile Delta in Northeast Africa.

The Hittites At Their Peak

Half a century later later, at its greatest extent, under Kings Suppiluliuma I(c.1350–1322) and Mursili II (c.1321–1295), the Hittite Empire included all of Anatolia (including Troy) except the immediate vicinity of modern Istanbul, the Levant from modern Turkey to a little bit North of Beruit on the coast and as far South as what is today Damascus further inland, and the ancient city of Mari, which is situated very close to where the Euphrates river crosses the modern Syrian border. (Map here).

The Hittites had absorbed all of the Mittani empire except some of its lands in the upper Tigris, and extended to the South the Mittani border with Egypt.

The End of the Hittite Empire and the Anatolian languages

A civil War followed by a series of regional events roughly contemporaneous with the Trojan War of the Greek epics and various historical accounts lumped together as part of the "Bronze Age collapse" destroyed the Hittite empire around 1200 BC. The Hittite language is replaced by successor languages after the Hittite empire falls.

Following this peak, one of the Anatolian languages was the Luwian language, which may have been the language of the Trojans. Luwain may have actually been a sister language of Hittite and equally old, as attested by its early use as a liturgical language along with pre-Indo-European languages of the area. Luwain may also have been an evolutionary linguistic predecessor to Hittite proper.

Luwain, in turn, evolved into the Lycian. See Bryce, Trevor R., "The Lycians - Volume I: The Lycians in Literary and Epigraphic Sources" (1986)). Other Anatolian languages including Lycian were successor Anatolian languages to Hittite that were spoken in Anatolia through the first century BCE.  Then, in the first century BCE, Alexander the Great conquered an area including Anatolia, and made Greek, which is a neighboring Indo-European language, the language of his kingdom.

Recap of Anatolian History 

All of the Indo-European Anatolian languages (with the possible exception of Luwian) spoken from around 1740 BCE to about 100 BCE, when they were replaced by Greek under Alexander the Great, trace their roots to the city-state they established by conquering the pre-existing city of Kanesh in central Anatolia.

There is no evidence for the presence of any Indo-European languages in Anatolia prior to about 2000-1800 BCE, and the available historical record seems to indicate that early Anatolian populations of Indo-Europeans were mere pockets of people at the time who may very likely have been recent arrivals.

Armenian is not an Anatolian language and is most closely related linguistically to Greek, but with many non-Indo-European and Indo-Iranian areal influences.  Armenian may have arrived in its current location shortly after the fall of the Hittite empire in a folk migration from Western Anatolia, the Aegean, or the Balkans.  It is sometimes associated with the Phrygians.

Post-Script: The Tocharians

[This fragment not about the Hittites is also salvaged from this old post.]

The oldest mummies in the Tarim basin of what is now Ugygur China (i.e. in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region) in the far Northeast of modern China also date to 1800 BCE.

Pliny the Elder, in Rome, recounts a first century CE report from an ambassador to China from Ceylon who later served as an ambassador to the Roman empire, that corroborates the existence of people with this appearance and a language unlike those known locally.

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.

Early Bronze Age Ancient DNA From Anatolia and Adjacent Regions

Overview and Analysis

A new paper on ancient Anatolian genetics is not open access so I have to rely on the blog of Bernard, a French anthropologist, and the abstract, for the details. But, this is enough to see that what is really notable.

What is most striking is the apparent absence of steppe ancestry in any of the 89 new samples, in an overall region in which speakers of the Hittite language and another representative of Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family were attested historically from around 1800 BCE in central Anatolia, and eventually more widely in the region. 

But, this is somewhat less notable than it seems, because all of the samples reviewed in the paper from 2000 BCE to 1000 BCE come from either Alalakh (26) or Ebla (12), both in the Northern Levant, and all of the Ebla samples, as well as several of the Alalakh samples, come from before 1800 BCE. 

To my knowledge, there is no actually Anatolian, let alone definitively Hittite DNA from the 2000 BCE to 1000 BCE time period from any source. 

If my hypothesis is correct, people with ancestry derived from the Hittite founding population, including in particular, most nobles and elites, would show significant steppe ancestry in that time period.

There is one woman, from the twenty-six individuals from Alalakh whose DNA was sequenced, who is an outlier with ancestry characterized as Central Asian/Iranian and dated to about 1540 BCE (a few decades after the city of Alalakh was sacked by the Hittites). She may have arrived there when the city was under Mittani rule or influence, as it was at the about that time. The Mittani kingdom was a historically attested Northern Iranian kingdom, whose territory overlapped with the geographic region of this woman's likely genetic origins (notable, in part, because it appears that its elite spoke Sanskrit) that grew to rule Northern Syria. Eurogenes discusses at greater length that possibility that this is a Mittani woman and one other individual in the study. In regard to this paper Davidski also notes that:

Note that one of the Bronze Age females from Alalakh, labeled ALA019, appears to have ancestry from Turan and the Eurasian steppe. She may well have been a Mitanni of Indo-Aryan origin. 

Interestingly, a Copper Age [a.k.a. Eneolithic a.k.a. Chalcolithic era] male from Arslantepe [in eastern central Anatolia a.k.a. Melid], ART038, belongs to Y-haplogroup R1b1a2 aka R1b-V1636. This is an unusual find, because R1b hasn't yet been reported in any Copper Age or earlier samples from outside of Europe and the Eurasian steppe. 

As far as I can tell, this individual doesn't harbor any genome-wide ancestry from north of the Caucasus. However, R1b-V1636 is a rare lineage that is first attested in Eneolithic samples from the North Caucasus Piedmont steppe, so ART038's Y-chromosome might be the first evidence of the presence of steppe ancestry in Copper Age Anatolia.

All of the samples in this paper from Arslantepe are from between 4000 BCE and 3000 BCE. Wikipedia describes the history of this location as follows:

Late Chalcolithic 

Earliest habitation at the site dates back to the Chalcolithic period. 

Aslantepe (VII) became important in this region in the Late Chalcolithic. A monumental area with a huge mudbrick building stood on top of a mound. The building had a large building with wall decorations and its function is uncertain. 

Early Bronze 

By the late Uruk period development had grown to include a large temple/palace complex. 

Culturally, Melid was part of the "Northern regions of Greater Mesopotamia" functioning as a trade colony along the Euphrates River bringing raw materials to Sumer (Lower Mesopotamia). 

Numerous similarities have been found between these early layers at Arslantepe, and the somewhat later site of Birecik (Birecik Dam Cemetery), also in Turkey, to the southwest of Melid. 

Around 3000 BCE, the transitonal EBI-EBII, there was widespread burning and destruction, after which Kura-Araxes culture pottery appeared in the area. This was a mainly pastoralist culture connected with the Caucasus mountains. 

Late Bronze Age 

In the Late Bronze Age, the site became an administrative center of a larger region in the kingdom of Isuwa. The city was heavily fortified, probably due to the Hittite threat from the west. It was culturally influenced by the Hurrians, the Mitanni and the Hittites. 

Around 1350 BC, Suppiluliuma I of the Hittites conquered Melid in his war against Tushratta of Mitanni. At the time Melid was a regional capital of the Land of Isuwa at the frontier between the Hittites and the Mitanni loyal to Tushratta. Suppiluliuma I used Melid as a base for his military campaign to sack the Mitanni capital Wassukanni. 

Iron Age 

After the end of the Hittite empire, from the 12th to 7th century BC, the city became the center of an independent Luwian Neo-Hittite state of Kammanu. A palace was built and monumental stone sculptures of lions and the ruler erected. 

The encounter with the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser I (1115-1077 BC) resulted in the kingdom of Melid being forced to pay tribute to Assyria. Melid remained able to prosper until the Assyrian king Sargon II (722-705 BC) sacked the city in 712 BC. At the same time the Cimmerians and Scythians invaded Anatolia and the city declined. 

As explained in more depth below, despite their proximity of Anatolia to these sites in the Northern Levant, neither of the sites in this study that are the source of all of the samples in the time period from 2000 BCE to 1200 BCE were colonized or occupied by the Hittite people for any extended length of time and were never places where Indo-European Anatolian languages were spoken.

Two Explanations

There are basically two ways to resolve this conundrum. 

I believe that the most plausible of the two is that Indo-Europeans arrived in Anatolia mostly after 2000 BCE, and that the apparent time depth of the Anatolian languages relative to other Indo-European language families is due to the very different substrate influences the Indo-Europeans encountered and to a fairly elite driven language shift process. 

But, I will first present the other possibility, before justifying my preferred hypothesis in greater depth.

The Middle Neolithic Anatolian Languages Split Scenario

One narrative hypothesizes that the Anatolian languages have a much greater time depth of differentiation from proto-Indo-European relative to other branches of the Indo-European language family, because the Anatolian languages are so strongly differentiated from the other Indo-European languages. 

But, this study does fairly definitively establish the absence of steppe ancestry in the time period from 4000 BCE to 2000 BCE which would have been the early phase of Anatolian language development in this scenario. 

So, in this narrative, Indo-European languages might originate in Anatolia, and spread to the nearby Pontic-Caspian steppe via an elite with little demic impact (for there is stunningly little Anatolian or Caucasian ancestry among the people of the steppe from ca. 4000 BCE to 1200 BCE), where it made a secondary expansion that was dominated by people with steppe ancestry. 

There is really no archaeological indication, however, of an elite led cultural revolution on the steppe dramatic enough to lead to language shift from a South Caucasian or Anatolian source at about the right time period. And, there is no attestation of anything strongly suggestive of an Indo-European culture (not even in proper names) from neighboring Egyptian, Semitic and Sumerian civilizations, that were literate from 3500 BCE on, about 1650 years before the earliest attested evidence of the Hittites or other linguistically Anatolian peoples in the writings of these peoples, many of whom were engaged in wide ranging trade that extended into Anatolia.

Eurogenes quotes some of the analysis from a 2017 paper in support of this hypothesis and then goes on the criticize it.

Apparently, Mathieson et al. 2017 aren't comfortable with putting the PIE homeland on the Pontic-Caspian Steppe because they can't find any evidence in their ancient DNA dataset of a significant migration through the Balkans that would potentially bring Anatolian languages from the Pontic-Caspian steppe to Anatolia. From the paper:

"One version of the Steppe Hypothesis of Indo-European language origins suggests that Proto-Indo European languages developed in the steppe north of the Black and Caspian seas, and that the earliest known diverging branch – Anatolian – was spread into Asia Minor by movements of steppe peoples through the Balkan peninsula during the Copper Age around 4000 BCE, as part of the same incursions from the steppe that coincided with the decline of the tell settlements. If this were correct, then one way to detect evidence of it would be the appearance of large amounts of characteristic steppe ancestry first in the Balkan Peninsula, and then in Anatolia. However, our genetic data do not support this scenario. While we find steppe ancestry in Balkan Copper Age and Bronze Age individuals, this ancestry is sporadic across individuals in the Copper Age, and at low levels in the Bronze Age. Moreover, while Bronze Age Anatolian individuals have CHG/Iran Neolithic related ancestry, they have neither the EHG ancestry characteristic of all steppe populations sampled to date [20] , nor the WHG ancestry that is ubiquitous in southeastern Europe in the Neolithic (Figure 1A, Supplementary Data Table 2, Supplementary Information section 1). This pattern is consistent with that seen in northwestern Anatolia [11] and later in Copper Age Anatolia [23], suggesting continuing migration into Anatolia from the East rather than from Europe." 

And this... 

"On the other hand, our data could still be consistent with the Steppe-Balkans-Anatolia route hypothesis model, albeit with constraints. It remains possible that populations dating to around 1600 BCE in the regions where the Indo-European Luwian, Hittite and Palaic languages were spoken did have European hunter-gatherer ancestry. However, our results would require that such ancestry was not ubiquitous in Bronze Age Anatolia, and was perhaps tightly linked to Indo-European speaking groups. We predict that additional insight about the genetic origins of the potential speakers of early Indo-European languages will be obtained when ancient DNA data become available from additional sites in this key period in Anatolia and the Caucasus."

I am agnostic about the route by which the early Anatolian speakers made their way from a possible steppe origin to Anatolia, although an Eastern route along the Black Sea coast or over the Caucasus mountains is at least as plausible as a Balkan route.

The Bronze Age Anatolian Language Origins Scenario

The other hypothesizes that Indo-Europeans with steppe ancestry first arrived in Anatolia around 2000 BCE to 1750 BCE when they were first attested in writing by neighboring literate cultures (as newly arrived peoples found in just a few places), around the same time as Indo-European expansion into the Balkans, the Aegean, Iran, and South Asia. 

In this second scenario, steppe ancestry was absent from Anatolia in earlier time periods (before 2000 BCE) because no Indo-Europeans had arrived there yet. 

Steppe ancestry is not seen in Anatolia proper in the Bronze Age after 2000 BCE, because we only have one sample in the area and time period, and that may not be ethnically a Hittite or one of some other Anatolian population. 

In this narrative, the linguistic distinctiveness of the Anatolian languages could also be explained not by time depth, but (1) by stronger and qualitatively different substrate impacts and contact effects in a place where the substrate language may have been very different from the former LBK culture and Harappan culture's languages (substrate influences that are identical across a language family are hard to distinguish from features of a proto-language of the superstrate language itself), and (2) because the Anatolian language speakers who may have been merely a ruling elite, leading to lots of substrate influence from language learners adapting to the language of their new elites gave rise to more substrate influence, relative to other places where a much larger percentage of the population was replaced by expanding Indo-Europeans.

Why would the substrate be different in Anatolia from that of the Anatolian derived early European farmers (EEF) who expanded into Europe in the European Neolithic revolution?

Because, the major change in the Anatolian gene pool documented in this new paper which probably occurred ca. 6500 BCE (at or shortly after the time the first early European farmers left), in which South Caucasian/Iranian farmers admixed with Western Anatolian farmers who were ancestral to both of the main branches of the first farmers of Europe (the LBK by land, and the Cardial Pottery culture along the Mediterranean coast or at least further South, possibly by sea). Indeed, mass migration from the East could have been a push factor driving Western Anatolian farmers to migrate into Europe.

The language family, although perhaps not actual language, shared by these two main European Neolithic cultures of the early European farmers, would have provided a very similar substrate language for all of the Indo-Europeans who subsequently expanded into Europe in the Bronze Age. 

But, the admixture seen across Anatolia was probably accompanied by a language shift to a Caucasian/Iranian farmer language from a different language family entirely from that of the language family of the Early European Farmers. 

This would give the Anatolian languages a very different substrate than the Indo-European languages encountered in Europe. And, it also appears that while the Neolithic and Eneolithic civilizations of Europe and South Asia had almost completely collapsed by the time that the Indo-Europeans arrived, Anatolia was less hard hit, and thus, its existing civilization, while ultimately conquered by the Indo-Europeans, were able to put up more of a fight and avoid massive population replacement to the extent seen, for example, in Britain and Ireland. A disconnect linguistically and ethnically between a ruling elite and ordinary people in a contemporaneous kingdom nearby was seen among the Mittani whose elite may have been Sanskrit speaking Indo-Aryans, but whose ordinary people where non-Indo-Europeans who spoke the non-Indo-European Hurrian language.

Image via the Wikipedia page for the Mittani

I have long favored this latter scenario, which is not inconsistent with the data in the new paper.

Alalakh and Ebla Were Linguistically Semitic In The Time Periods For Which We Have Samples And Were Not Occupied By Significant Numbers of Anatolian Language Speakers For Extended Periods Of Time

Ebla was never ruled by the Hittites, who destroyed the city about three hundred years after the last sample in the city in this study was taken, so no steppe ancestry would be expected there. As Wikipedia explains:

Starting as a small settlement in the Early Bronze Age (c. 3500 BC), Ebla developed into a trading empire and later into an expansionist power that imposed its hegemony over much of northern and eastern Syria. Ebla was destroyed during the 23rd century BC; it was then rebuilt and was mentioned in the records of the Third Dynasty of Ur. The second Ebla was a continuation of the first, ruled by a new royal dynasty. It was destroyed at the end of the 3rd millennium BC, which paved the way for the Amorite tribes to settle in the city, forming the third Ebla. The third kingdom also flourished as a trade center; it became a subject and an ally of Yamhad (modern-day Aleppo) until its final destruction by the Hittite king Mursili I in c. 1600 BC. 

Ebla maintained its prosperity through a vast trading network. Artifacts from Sumer, Cyprus, Egypt and as far as Afghanistan were recovered from the city's palaces. The kingdom had its own language, Eblaite, and the political organization of Ebla had features different from the Sumerian model. Women enjoyed a special status, and the queen had major influence in the state and religious affairs. The pantheon of gods was mainly north Semitic and included deities exclusive to Ebla. The city was excavated starting in 1964 and became famous for the Ebla tablets, an archive of about 20,000 cuneiform tablets found there, dated to around 2350 BC. Written in both Sumerian and Eblaite and using the cuneiform, the archive has allowed a better understanding of the Sumerian language and provided important information over the political organization and social customs of the mid-3rd millennium BC's Levant.

We also have extensive contemporaneous written accounts from Alalakh, well preserved in cuneiform that allow us to discern the former city-state's history and linguistic situation in a manner that wouldn't be reliable from other archaeological evidence. 

This city was founded by Semitic Amorite people until the Hittites destroyed it, ca. 1587–1560 BC. Less than a century later, people writing in Semitic cuneiform resided there again in a rebuilt city, which, while it may have owed allegiance to the Hittite empire from the mid-1300s BCE,  as spoils involved in the defeat of the Mittani rulers of the city (whose elites may have spoken Sanskrit), it does not appear to have ever been colonized by the Hittites and the city was abandoned within half a century of be acquired by the Hittite empire.

As Wikipedia summarizes the evidence:

Alalakh was founded by the Amorites (in the territory of present-day Turkey) during the early Middle Bronze Age in the late 3nd millennium BC. The first palace was built c. 2000 BC, contemporary with the Third Dynasty of Ur. 

Middle Bronze II 

The written history of the site may begin under the name Alakhtum, with tablets from Mari in the 18th century BC, when the city was part of the kingdom of Yamhad (modern Aleppo). A dossier of tablets records that King Sumu-Epuh sold the territory of Alakhtum to his son-in-law Zimri-Lim, king of Mari, retaining for himself overlordship. After the fall of Mari in 1765 BC, Alalakh seems to have come under the rule of Yamhad again. King Abba-El I of Aleppo bestowed it upon his brother Yarim-Lim, to replace the city of Irridu. Abba-El had destroyed the latter after it revolted against his brother Yarim-Lim. A dynasty of Yarim-Lim's descendants was founded, under the hegemony of Aleppo, that lasted to the 16th century [BCE]. According to the short chronology found at Mari, at that time Alalakh was destroyed, most likely by Hittite king Hattusili I, in the second year of his campaigns. 

Late Bronze 

After a hiatus of less than a century, written records for Alalakh resume. At this time, it was again the seat of a local dynasty. Most of the information about the founding of this dynasty comes from a statue inscribed with what seems to be an autobiography of the dynasty's founding king. 

According to his inscription, in the 15th century BC, Idrimi, son of the king of Yamhad, may have fled his city for Emar, traveled to Alalakh, gained control of the city, and been recognized as a vassal by Barattarna. The inscription records Idrimi's vicissitudes: after his family had been forced to flee to Emar, he left them and joined the "Hapiru people" in "Ammija in the land of Canaan." The Hapiru recognized him as the "son of their overlord" and "gathered around him"; after living among them for seven years, he led his Habiru warriors in a successful attack by sea on Alalakh, where he became king. 

However, according to the archeological site report, this statue was discovered in a level of occupation dating several centuries after the time that Idrimi lived. There has been much scholarly debate as to its historicity. Archeologically-dated tablets recount that Idrimi's son Niqmepuh was contemporaneous with the Mitanni king Saushtatar. This seems to support the inscription on the statue claiming that Idrimi was contemporaneous with Barattarna, Saushtatar's predecessor. 

The socio-economic history of Alalakh during the reign of Idrimi's son and grandson, Niqmepuh and Ilim-ilimma, is well documented by tablets excavated from the site. Idrimi is referred to rarely in these tablets. 

In the mid-14th century BC, the Hittite Suppiluliuma I defeated king Tushratta of Mitanni and assumed control of northern Syria, then including Alalakh, which he incorporated into the Hittite Empire. A tablet records his grant of much of Mukish's land (that is, Alalakh's) to Ugarit, after the king of Ugarit alerted the Hittite king to a revolt by the kingdoms of Mukish, Nuhassa, and Niye. The majority of the city was abandoned by 1300 BC.  

Alalakh was probably destroyed by the Sea People in the 12th century BC, as were many other cities of coastal Anatolia and the Levant. The site was never reoccupied, the port of Al Mina taking its place during the Iron Age.

The Wikipedia entry for Hattsusili I (the Hittite King who destroyed Alalakh before it was rebuilt) is also informative:

Hattusili I (Ḫattušili I) was a king of the Hittite Old Kingdom. He reigned ca. 1586–1556 BC (short chronology). 

He used the title of Labarna at the beginning of his reign. It is uncertain whether he is the second king so identified, making him Labarna II, or whether he is identical to Labarna I, who is treated as his predecessor in Hittite chronologies. 

During his reign, he moved the capital from Neša (Kaneš, near modern Kültepe) to Ḫattuša (near modern Boğazkale), taking the throne name of Ḫattušili to mark the occasion. 

He is the earliest Hittite ruler for whom contemporary records have been found. In addition to "King of Ḫattuša", he took the title "Man of Kuššara", a reference to the prehistoric capital and home of the Hittites, before they had occupied Neša. 

A cuneiform tablet . . . written in both the Hittite and the Akkadian language provides details of six years of his reign. In it, he claims to have extended the Hittite domain to the sea, and in the second year, to have subdued Alalakh and other cities in Syria. In the third year, he campaigned against Arzawa in western Anatolia, then returned to Syria to spend the next three years retaking his former conquests from the Hurrians, who had occupied them in his absence.

Wikipedia tells us this about the Mittani Kingdom:

Currently there are two hypotheses regarding how Mitanni was formed: 1) Mitanni was already a powerful kingdom at the end of the 17th century or in the first half of the 16th century BC, and its beginnings are from before the time of Thutmose I, so dated to the time of the Hittite sovereigns Hattusili I and Mursili I. 2) Mitanni came to be due to a political vacuum in Syria, which had been created first through the destruction of the kingdom of Yamhad by the Hittites and then through the inability of Hatti to maintain control of the region during the period following the death of Mursili I. In this case Mitanni (c. 1500 to 1300 BC) could have come to be a regional power after the Hittite destruction of Amorite Babylon and a series of ineffectual Assyrian kings created a power vacuum in Mesopotamia. 

While the Mitanni kings were supposedly Indo-Aryan, they used the language of the local people, which was at that time a non-Indo-European language, Hurrian. Their sphere of influence is shown in Hurrian place names, personal names and the spread through Syria and the Levant of a distinct pottery type.

The Paper

The paper and is abstract and a couple of its illustrations are as follows: 

Highlights

• Genome-wide analysis of 110 ancient individuals from the Near East 

• Gene pools of Anatolia and Caucasus were biologically connected ∼6500 BCE 

• Gene flow from neighboring populations in Northern Levant during 3rd millennium BCE 

• One individual of likely Central Asian origin in 2nd millennium BCE Northern Levant 

Summary

Here, we report genome-wide data analyses from 110 ancient Near Eastern individuals spanning the Late Neolithic to Late Bronze Age, a period characterized by intense interregional interactions for the Near East. 

Fig. 1A  showing the new samples examined. The differently colored outlier sample from ca. 1500 BCE is also from Alalakh. 

We find that 6th millennium BCE populations of North/Central Anatolia and the Southern Caucasus shared mixed ancestry on a genetic cline that formed during the Neolithic between Western Anatolia and regions in today’s Southern Caucasus/Zagros. 

The "Graphical Abstract" from the paper below.

During the Late Chalcolithic and/or the Early Bronze Age, more than half of the Northern Levantine gene pool was replaced, while in the rest of Anatolia and the Southern Caucasus, we document genetic continuity with only transient gene flow. 

Additionally, we reveal a genetically distinct individual within the Late Bronze Age Northern Levant. 

Overall, our study uncovers multiple scales of population dynamics through time, from extensive admixture during the Neolithic period to long-distance mobility within the globalized societies of the Late Bronze Age.

Keywords 

human population history: ancient DNA: Near East: Eastern Mediterranean: genome-wide data: admixture: genetic continuity: archaeogenetics: Ubaid: Uruk: Kura-Araxes

Eirini Skourtanioti, et al., Genomic History of Neolithic to Bronze Age Anatolia, Northern Levant, and Southern Caucasus 181(5) Cell 1158-1175.e28 (May 28, 2020). Hat tip to Bernard's Blog.

Bernard reports (in Google translate with minor modifications of my own from the French original) that:

Early genetic studies have shown that the first farmers in Anatolia, the southern Levant and northwest Iran are the descendants of local hunter-gatherers. Thus the transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic took place in the region without significant movement of populations.  

However two millennia later the situation changes. In fact, the Chalcolithic and early Bronze Age populations show less genetic differentiation suggesting that this latter transition was accompanied by large population movements. . . . Archaeological evidence in the region shows many connections between different regions of the Near East at different times. Thus at the end of the Neolithic the north of Mesopotamia (cultures of Halaf and Samarra) is connected with the east of Anatolia. During the second half of the 4th millennium BCE the Kura-Araxes culture originating from the south of the Caucasus, extends west and east. Are these different connections the result of movement of populations or only of ideas? . . . 

The authors eliminated 16 samples due to the poor quality of the genome obtained and 5 samples closely linked in the first or second degree with other samples. The remaining 89 genomes have been added to around 800 previously published genomes, including 17 Anatolians from the archaeological sites of Tepecik-Ciftlik, Barcın, Gondürle-Höyük, Topakhöyük and Kaman-Kalehöyük and dated from the same period. . . . 

[T]he individuals of the end of the Neolithic or the beginning of the Chalcolithic . . . are located on a gradient which extends along the second component between the individuals of the West Anatolian Neolithic (Barcin) . . . and ancient individuals from Iran and the Caucasus . . . . However, the samples from the early Chalcolithic from the Tell Kurdu site in the northern Levant are slightly deviated towards the individuals from the southern Levant. . . .

The qpAdm software makes it possible to model the individuals of Büyükkaya and the South Caucasus as coming from a genetic mixture between a West Anatolian population (respectively 76% and 69%) and a population of northern Iran (respectively 24% and 31%), and individuals from the North Levant of Tell Kurdu as coming from a genetic mixture between a West Anatolian population (47.9%), the Levant (36.6%) and a population from northern Iran (15.5%)[.] . . . 

Unlike the individuals of the previous period, the individuals of the end of the Chalcolithic and the beginning of the Bronze Age all regroup in the middle of the previous gradient. These results are confirmed by the f3 and f4 statistics. There has therefore was significant genetic admixture in the region which homogenized the genetic profile of the populations located between western Anatolia and the southern Caucasus. The authors estimated the date of genetic admixture at around 105 generations or 3000 years before the time of these individuals, corresponding to a date of genetic mixing around 6500 BCE. This genetic mix varies between 21 and 38% of Iranian ancestry and the rest of West Anatolian ancestry. 

The individuals of the North Levant genetically most resemble the other Anatolian populations. However, the qpAdm software and the f4 statistics suggest that these individuals still differ from other populations due to their greater genetic affinity with the populations of the southern Levant.

Among the individuals of Alalakh, there is one that differs from all the others. This individual is a woman who was discovered at the bottom of a well, dated around 1540 BCE, and her skeleton shows traces of old wounds. She is located on the PCA near individuals from Central Asia and eastern Iran.

As an aside, this paper is the first published journal article that I have seen with both a "video abstract" and a video accompanying it in the supplemental materials.

Did Hittites and Other PIE Anatolian Language Speakers Lack Steppe Ancestry?

Iosif Lazaridis, in the pre-print "The evolutionary history of human populations in Europe" (May 4, 2018) casts doubt on the Steppe hypothesis as applied to the Anatolian language family within the Indo-European languages. While I understand the basis for his speculation, I think that this possibility is improbable and that late Bronze Age samples from Hittite individuals will show steppe ancestry.

The most prominent of the languages in this family was the Hittite language of the Bronze Age Hittite people who conquered essentially all of Anatolia and some of the Northern Levant and Northern Mesopotamia in the Bronze Age before collapsing in the Bronze Age collapse.

Contemporaneous historical accounts from Akkadian traders suggest that this conquest started shortly before 1740 BCE. Advocates for an early arrival of Anatolian language speakers (on linguistic grounds) argue that these languages should have been pervasive in Anatolia for more than a thousand years before this expansion, despite evidence that the territory conquered by the Hittites mostly spoke a non-Indo-European Hattic language.

But, the archaeology does not support this conclusion and there are not early historical accounts to support this claim either. Physical anthropology of remains from the region also point to a late arrival of physically distinct people in Anatolian linguistic communities.

The only other pre-Hittite empire Anatolian language which is attested is Luwian, a sister language to Hittite possibly spoken by the Trojans. The other Anatolian languages are only attested after the collapse of the Hittite empire and could have a relationship to it similar to that of Latin to the Romance languages.

They key passage states:

Steppe migrants Steppe populations during the Eneolithic to Bronze Age were a mix of at least two elements[28], the EHG who lived in eastern Europe ~8kya and a southern population element related to present-day Armenians[28], and ancient Caucasus hunter-gatherers[22], and farmers from Iran[24]. Steppe migrants made a massive impact in Central and Northern Europe post5kya[28,43]. Some of them expanded eastward, founding the Afanasievo culture[43] and also eventually reached India[24]. 

These expansions are probable vectors for the spread of Late Proto-Indo-European[44] languages from eastern Europe into both mainland Europe and parts of Asia, but the lack of steppe ancestry in the few known samples from Bronze Age Anatolia[45] raises the possibility that the steppe was not the ultimate origin of Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the common ancestral language of Anatolian speakers, Tocharians, and Late Proto-Indo Europeans. In the next few years this lingering mystery will be solved: either Anatolian speakers will be shown to possess steppe-related ancestry absent in earlier Anatolians (largely proving the steppe PIE hypothesis), or they will not (largely falsifying it, and pointing to a Near Eastern PIE homeland).

Note 45 is a reference to Lazaridis I, et al.: "Genetic origins of the Minoans and Mycenaeans." 584 Nature 214 (2017), which contains three Bronze Age Anatolian samples from Southwest Turkey. The one male and two female Bronze Age Anatolian samples relied upon are as follows (from the Supplemental Materials):

I2495	I2495	A4-1	1240K	2558-2295 caIBCE (3925±35 BP, Poz-81111)	Anatolia_BA	Harmanӧren- Gӧndürle Hӧyük, Isparta	Turkey	37.92	30.71	M	1.981	637146	H	J1a
I2499	I2499	UC1	1240K	2836-2472 caIBCE (4040±35 BP, Poz-82213)	Anatolia_BA	Harmanӧren- Gӧndürle Hӧyük, Isparta	Turkey	37.92	30.71	F	0.285	243348	K1a2
I2683	I2683	G3-95	1240K	2500-1800 BCE	Anatolia_BA	Harmanӧren- Gӧndürle Hӧyük, Isparta	Turkey	37.92	30.71	F	3.695	749308	T2b

The man has Y-DNA J1a, mtDNA H and no steppe ancestry and is from 2558-2295 BCE. One woman is from 2836-2472 BCE, has mtDNA K1a2 and has no steppe ancestry. The other woman is from 2500-1800 BCE, has mtDNA T2b and has no steppe ancestry.

We don't have heaps of information about the archaeological context, but two of the three samples clearly pre-date the Hittite expansion that is attested historically and archaeologically in Anatolia and the third, a woman, could pre-date or post-date that expansion which in every other case was male dominated.

This data is a blow to the theory that the Anatolian languages broke away especially early form the Indo-European languages and were present in Anatolia long before 2000 BCE. 

But, it is not at all in conflict with my longstanding hypothesis that the Anatolian languages arrived in Anatolia with steppe people at a time similar to their arrival in Europe, the Aegean, South Asia and West Asia (i.e. Iran) and that the divergence of the Anatolian languages from other PIE language families is due to stronger and more divergent substrate influences rather than from great antiquity.

If my hypothesis is right, these data are a perfect fit and steppe ancestry should start to become widespread especially in specifically Anatolian language speaking men, and more generally, in late Bronze Age Anatolia. It will take future ancient DNA finds from those periods to determine if this is correct.

I also disagree with his conclusion that an absence of steppe ancestry would imply a Near Eastern PIE homeland. Instead, it would imply that the Anatolian languages arrived in Anatolia largely via elite transmission which could also help explain why it is more divergent than Indo-European languages that arrived with large communities of native speakers via mass migration.

UPDATE May 14, 2018: Davidski does some analysis of the Bronze Age Anatolian genomes discussed above, and agrees with me that these are likely Hattian and not Hittite individuals, albeit for slightly different reasons. He also notes, in data completely consistent with my late Anatolian expansion hypothesis that: "I am actually seeing a minor, but persistent, signal of steppe ancestry in one of the two Old-Hittite Period (~1750–1500 BCE) samples: Anatolia_MLBA MA2203." Also, not inconsistent with the historical record or a late Anatolian expansion hypothesis is his observation that: "None of the other Anatolia_MLBA individuals, three of whom are from the Assyrian Colony Period (~2000–1750 BCE), show such obvious steppe ancestry."