Hittite

Where it was spoken

Hittite was the administrative language of the Hittite Empire, which dominated central Anatolia and northern Syria from roughly 1650 to 1180 BCE. The capital, Hattusa, yielded tens of thousands of clay tablets when excavated in the early 1900s — including treaties, royal annals, ritual texts, and a complete law code.

What it sounded like

Hittite is the oldest documented branch of Indo-European and preserved archaic features lost in every later Indo-European language, including consonants reconstructed as “laryngeals” — confirming a theoretical proposal made by Saussure decades before Hittite was deciphered.

How it’s written

Hittite scribes adopted Mesopotamian cuneiform from Akkadian sources. The mixed logographic-syllabic system used Sumerograms (Sumerian word-signs), Akkadograms (Akkadian phonetic spellings), and Hittite phonetic signs side by side — making decipherment a layered puzzle.