Eti

I have a keen interest in prehistory and very early history and in my time, I have visited a number of prehistoric sites in Turkey and in some of the surrounding countries. They are usually unattractive to the eye, leaving much to the imagination. Yet I cannot get enough of them and everywhere I go I seek out and make it a point of checking them out. I have paid the symbolic visit to Çatal Höyük, the feminists' favourite. I have been round Mari, the Sumerian city in Syria (with my friend Mari who wanted to visit her homonymic place...). And I have equally visited Boğazkale and Alacahöyük, the Hitite sites near Çorum, where funnily named kings (Suppiluliuma, anyone?) worshipped a thousand gods, fought the Egyptians, and spoke and wrote the world's earliest attested Indo-European language. They even had typical Indo-Europea myths, like their own version of the Indian myth of Indra and Vritra, a different kind of Siegfried Drachentöter, the German guy who kills a dragon in the Niebelungenlied: The skygod Tarhun who slayed the serpent Illuyanka with his triple thunderbolt.

And before you can even pronounce "Suppiluliuma"'s name, I find myself blogging about the Hittites:
Hittite civilisation and its myths formed an important vehicle through which ancient Babylonian and Sumerian myths, passed on to the Hittites via the Hurrians, eventually influenced Hellenic mythology.
The most interesting myth of Hurrian origin found with the Hittites is the one of Kumarbi, the father of all gods.
Before Kumarbi there was Alalu. But Anu fought him and won. Alalu fled to the underworld and Anu took his place on the throne of the heavens. Kumarbi, the son of Alalu, came back to face Anu. What happened in the fight is that, in short, Kumarbi bit off Anu's wiener. In this way he became pregnant of the Storm God Teshup, and his brother the god Tashmishu, as well as the River Aranzah (the Tigris!).
In Hesiod's "Theogonia" parallels to Hittite texts are obvious: Hierarchically, the gods Anu, Kumarbi and Teshup can be equated to Uranos, Kronos and Zeus.

Whereas the Kurds have the story of the snake-shouldered king Zahhak as their myth of origin, the Hittites myth of origin is something like what follows: The queen Kanesh bore within one year thirty male children. She did not know what to do with them, so she put them afloat on a river. They drifted until the land of Zalpuva, where the gods took them out of the floods and raised them. That is how the Hittites came about.

The Hittites were a prudent bunch, and instead of angering the gods of the people they conquered and subjected, they just adopted them as their own. That is why their territory was also called "land of the thousand gods" in their times. In worship, they drank wine, danced and sang songs, accompanying them with harp- and lute-like instruments, but also types of flutes, horns and drums.

Written in the Akkadian cuneiform script (the Akkadians were one of the people the Hittites invaded), the Hittite language was deciphered in 1906 in Istanbul by a Czech solider. "Nu NINDA-an ezzatteni nu watar-ma ekutteni", is the famous phrase that first was deciphered.
"Ninda" was the only word known at the time, Sumerian for "bread". Bedřich Hrozný, the man who deciphered the language, was a lieutenant from Austro-Hungary and although he grew up in Bohemia, bilingual in German.

I don't have to explain that it is a known fact that to subsist, humans relie on food as well as drink, ... - and the word following the Sumerian loan, "ezzati" ressembled the German "essen", "to eat", very closely. "Watar" in its turn looked much like German "Wasser", or obviously, the English "water" for that matter. The word that was thought to mean "to drink", "ekutteni" called to mind the Latin "acqua", also meaning water. " -teni" was henceforth understood to be a verb ending.

Apart from cuneiform, another writing system found in Boğazköy is hieroglyphs, although the language deciphered turned out to be Luwian, which, along with Palaic, constitutes the third Indo-European language known to be spoken on Asia Minor at the time. The remains to be analysed don't get anywhere near the amounts of scripture that remains to us of the Hittite language though.

Compared to the vast empires that were to follow in the region, the Roman and Byzantine ones, the realm of the Hitites seems minuscule to us, but we have to understand, that for the standards of the time, the Hitite Empire was a force to be reckoned with. At the end of the Hittite period, their state power was on an equal footing with the Assyrian, Babylonian and Egyptian empires.

The underground silos of Hattuşa bear witness to the economical power that the Hittites wielded. The economy was maintained mostly through the spoils of war raids. Because of this, the art of war was naturally given great importance in Hittite culture. At the times of Hatuşili I and Murşili I, their military power was so strong that they could advance all the way to Babylon and conduct a raid on it.
Their eclectic culture reflected these contacts with other nations: Their writing system and diplomatic language was Akkadian. The sphinxes at the gates of Hattuşa were probably inspired by Egyptian art. The swords and helmets their warriors used seem to come from Mycenaean Greece.

The National Geographic Turkey had a special about Hitite laws in some 2006 issue. There are mistakes in other parts of the article, so I do not know whether all the information is reliable. For what it's worth, the information seems interesting: For example as opposed to the Babylonian king Hammurabi's codex of law which provides that "the one made blind by someone, may blind that person", the Hittites were more progressive and only saw for material reparation, even in the case of murder. Punishments of mutilation were only applied to slaves. Prisons were only used for what today would be remand - the time that a culprit's crime was being examined. The death penalty however did exist, for crimes such as incest, rape and the use of black magic.
Other than that they had some of the lovable rules still today in use in the most rural parts just East of that region: The punishment for a woman (not a man, remark) committing adultery was death, although, summit of all charitableness, he could forgive her so she could stay alive. After a man's death, it was granted that his father or brother would take his widow for a wife.

The "Eti" of my title by the way is the name of a chocolate brand in Turkey. It is an older word for what today is called "Hitit", the ancient Anatolian people the Hittites, the Biblical sons of Heth.