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A 3,200-Year-Old Hittite Tablet Preserved a Language No One Knew Existe
A Hittite scribe working more than 3,000 years ago copied a ritual that included words from a language other than Hittite. Those few lines remain the only known written example of Kalašma, a language once spoken somewhere northwest of the Hittite capital. Before the tablet was identified, Kalašma was known only as the name of…
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Missing Connection in the History of Indo-European Languages Discovered
The origins of the Indo-European language family, believed to have emerged in the 4th millennium BCE, have gained clarity through ancient DNA analysis. A significant study by Ron Pinhasi and his team from the University of Vienna’s Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, in collaboration with David Reich’s ancient DNA laboratory at Harvard University, has yielded important…