Introduction to Hittites & Chicago Hittite Dictionary by Theo van den Hout

I have excerpted this article from the “News and Notes” of the Oriental Institute Winter 2011 issue. Theo van den Hout gives an excellent overview of the Hittite Empire, its modern discovery, and the central role the Chicago Hittite Dictionary plays in Hittitology today. To read the whole series on the Oriental Institute’s dictionaries or if you wish to see the figures referred to in the article below (I’ve only excerpted the text.) follow this link (You will need to scroll down through a couple articles to the article on the Hittite Dictionary).

More Than Just a Dictionary
–Theo van den Hout, Editor in Chief, The Chicago Hittite Dictionary

Some Recent History

In 1910, exactly one hundred years ago, Bruno Güterbock, director of the German Orient Society and father of Hans Güterbock, co-founder of our Hittite Dictionary, received a letter from the representative of the Berlin Museums in Constantinople about un-paid salaries of local guards of the excavations at Boğazköy, the former Hittite capital Hattusa. After two very successful seasons in 1906 and 1907 there had been no further digging, but the Germans were eager to return in 1911. The German archaeologist and Assyriologist Hugo Winckler had found thousands of clay tablets in those first two campaigns and definitively established that the small village some 100 miles east of Ankara had once been the center of the mighty Hittite empire. The letter asked for money to pay the guards, who had received no money since Winckler had left in 1907, as well as for the upkeep of the dig house at Boğazköy.

Apparently, the money was sent, because Winckler was able to leave Berlin on May 8, 1911, and finally arrived in Boğazköy on June 23. In 1912 he led his final campaign. Several letters from Winckler to Güterbock written during the 1912 season tell of his finds, among which are fragments of correspondence between the Hittite and Egyptian royal courts, daily life at the modern village of Boğazköy (a murder among the laborers!), and his increasing health problems. These resulted in his death in April 1913 that put a preliminary end to the German excavations.

Winckler had been able to identify Boğazköy as the seat of the Hittite empire because of international diplomatic documents found there that were written in Akkadian, but the overwhelming majority of the approximately 10,000 cuneiform texts unearthed by him were written in Hittite. Thus far this language had resisted attempts at decipherment. It wasn’t until 1915 that the Czech scholar Bedrich Hrozny recognized it as an Indo-European language akin to Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and others and that the “solution to the Hittite problem,” as he called it, was found. That year may be seen as the true birth date of Hittitology.

Some Less Recent History

During the period of their empire (ca. 1650–1200 bc), the Hittites were one of the superpowers of the ancient Near East alongside Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, and the Hurrians of the Mittani kingdom as well as the Mycenaean kings of Greece. In the heyday of its power, the empire stretched from the west coast of Anatolia to the upper Euphrates region in the east and covered much of modern-day Syria in the south (fig. 1). The island of Cyprus likewise fell in its sphere of influence. A remarkably continuous line of kings ruled this vast domain in an efficient system of provinces and provincial capitals from the central seat of administration Hattusa. Around 1200 bc, for reasons still imperfectly understood, the Hittites decided to abandon their capital and to move toward the southeast, only to suddenly disappear from the stage of history, taking with them the Hittite language.

After having been forgotten for almost three thousand years, excavations from the early twentieth century onward have unearthed the impressive legacy of Hittite civilization. Remains of their culture have been found spread all over Anatolia, and the capital of Hattusa with its gates, sanctuaries, and palaces is one of the largest and most impressive places of the ancient Near East. The excavations also brought to light an enormous body of written documents: some 30,000 tablets and fragments of tablets are now known (fig. 2), and each year archaeological campaigns add new texts to this corpus: letters; historiography; laws and other legal and administrative documents; treaties and instructions; myths, prayers, and hymns; translations and adaptations of foreign literature (including the Gilgamesh epic); oracles and omens; and a host of magic rituals and scenarios for religious festivals. All these texts allow us insight into a vibrant society matching a deeply felt religiosity to a great sense of realism and political astuteness. This varied corpus of texts often gives us a surprisingly direct and intimate picture of the Hittite ruling class with their all too human personal fears and anxieties.

Studying Hittite is studying some of the foundations of our modern Western civilization. Despite what is often thought, modern Western civilization did not start with the Greeks: the real cradle of our civilization stood in what is now the Middle East. Many literary and artistic themes and motifs can be traced back directly to that world, the Bible was embedded in ancient Near Eastern society, and the earliest forms of what we call modern science are found in Babylon. Anatolia is the natural bridge between those eastern and western worlds, and the Hittites and their later descendants in the same area served as intermediaries, passing on ancient Near Eastern culture to the West.

The Road to the Chicago Hittite Dictionary

Once Hittite had been deciphered by Hrozny in 1915, things developed rapidly: editions of the most important and interesting-looking texts were prepared, first outlines of Hittite history and culture were written, and volume after volume of copies of cuneiform texts appeared in print. Although Hittitology was largely a field of German scholarship and would remain so for a long time, British, French, Italian, and American scholars joined the effort. German excavations eventually resumed in 1931, and apart from a hiatus during and shortly after the Second World War, they continue into the present day. Not surprisingly, in the United States it was James Henry Breasted who led the way. The Oriental Institute sent several “Syro-Hittite” expeditions to Anatolia in the 1920s and 1930s. As every visitor to our Anatolian galleries can see, these were very successful in southeast Anatolia and northern Syria at places like Tell Tayinat and Çatal Höyük, but in central Anatolia they were not as lucky as Winckler, and a real imperial Hittite site like Boğazköy never came their way.

However, as witnessed in a letter of December 1928, Breasted already dreamed of a Hittite dictionary:

In the course of the work on the Assyrian Dictionary, it has been necessary of course to do some work on the Hittite documents but it has not been intended heretofore to include the purely Hittite materials in our present Assyrian Dictionary. Nevertheless, it would obviously be highly desirable to produce a Hittite dictionary.

Breasted’s dream came true when in 1975 Hans Güterbock and Harry A. Hoffner joined forces and started The Hittite Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, as we are officially called. It is more commonly known as the Chicago Hittite Dictionary or CHD. In the Annual Report of that year, they explained the need for a Hittite-English dictionary, and the progress of the project can be followed in every Annual Report since then. With the first of many grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1976, the necessary files were built up and the first entries written. A few years earlier in Munich, a Hittite-German dictionary had just started with the letter A, as any decent dictionary would. Wisely, however, Güterbock and Hoffner decided not to immediately replicate that work with their own English version. Instead L was chosen to be the first letter of the CHD, which came out in 1979. This was a wise decision indeed: as opposed to A, L is a relatively small letter with only few complicated or problematic entries. Every long-term project such as the CHD needs time to overcome initial problems and to establish a routine, and L was the perfect letter for doing so. Since then we have produced M, N, P, and over half of S. We plan to finish that letter in the coming year and are already working on T, the next letter in the Hittite “alphabet.”

What is the Chicago Hittite Dictionary?

The CHD is a comprehensive, bilingual Hittite-English dictionary. By “comprehensive” we mean that we claim to describe every word on the basis of all available material. Fortunately, the excavation of tablets and fragments continues, and our material basis is thus ever expanding. This means that we must make a continuous effort to update our files with every new fragment that is published.

Every entry in the dictionary is the result of a painstaking process: we aim to produce a dictionary that is not just a list of words and their meanings. If that were our goal, we would conclude next year. The vocabulary of a society reflects its ideas and its material world in all its aspects. A good dictionary is like an encyclopedia of the civilization whose language it records. The CHD is published in printed form but also accessible on the Internet as the eCHD through the Oriental Institute Website. In its electronic form, it has Turkish meanings added to the English ones, so that we are actually a bit more than just bilingual.

Because Hittite is no longer a living language, the CHD is a passive dictionary, that is, meant to be used in translating and interpreting the source language (Hittite) into the target language (English) only. In such a field with native speakers no longer available, a top-quality dictionary is the most important tool of every philologist and an indispensable work of reference for historians and all others professionally involved in the study of the ancient Near East.

Ultimately, it is the task of Hittitologists to preserve, study, and make known and accessible to a wider audience the achievements of Hittite culture and society. The first and foremost tool is a good, reliable dictionary based on as much material as possible. That is what the Chicago Hittite Dictionary is and does.
To go to the Chicago Dictionary online: click here.