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Digital Hittite

Language Log 2025-03-30

Cuneiforms: New digital tool for translating ancient texts, University of Würzburg, ScienceDaily (March 26, 2025)     Summary:    Major milestone reached in digital Cuneiform studies: Researchers present an innovative tool that offers many new possibilities

We usually associate cuneiform (Classical Latin cuneus [“wedge”] + fōrma) with Sumerian and Akkadian, but this logo-syllabic script was actually used for many languages in the ancient world:  Sumerian, Akkadian, Eblaite, Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian, Luwian, Urartian, Palaic, Aramaic, Old Persian.  In this post, we focus on its use for writing Hittite, the first Indo-European language, as described in the article cited above.

The UNESCO World Heritage Site of Boğazköy-Hattuša is located in the north of Turkey. It was once the capital of the Hittite Empire, a great power in the late Bronze Age around 1650 to 1200 BC.

The cuneiform tablets discovered there and in other Hittite sites represent one of the largest groups of texts from the ancient Near East.

They include thousands of sources in Hittite, an early-attested Indo-European language, as well as numerous fragments in other Anatolian languages, alongside Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hurrian texts.

An innovative digital tool has been offering researchers and students online access to these historical sources since 2023: the Thesaurus Linguarum Hethaeorum Digitalis (TLHdig 0.1) which was launched on the Hethitologie-Portal Mainz platform (HPM). Ever since its initial launch, this thesaurus has become one of the digital tools that Hittitologists use every day, with more than 100,000 accesses per month.

Expansion of the Tool with Many New Options

This tool is now even more powerful: As TLHdig 0.2 it is comprising more than 98% of all published sources — approximately 22,000 XML text documents, many of which consist of multiple rejoined fragments.

Currently the corpus consists of almost 400,000 transliterated lines.

But that's not all: TLHdig 1.0, expected in late 2025, will offer complete coverage of all published texts.

Researchers can browse and search texts in transliteration or cuneiform and apply various filters for more complex queries.

TLHdig is embedded within the infrastructure of Hethitologie-Portal Mainz and is integrated with various digital catalogue tools, media databases, and text editions.

Online Pipeline for New Text Publications

TLHdig is a community research tool. In compiling the corpus, the TLHdig team has drawn on digital and analogue resources developed by several generations of Hittitologists, including digital text edition projects on Hethitologie-Portal Mainz and the contributions of many individual scholars.

As a collaborative tool, TLHdig features an online submission pipeline for scholars publishing new Hittite cuneiform texts.

Users can copy and paste their transliterations into the creator interface and follow the prompts to finalise their submissions.

Since there are nearly 25,000 Hittite cuneiform tablets known to exist, the digitalization of catalogs, data bases, and texts will greatly enhance their study.

 

Selected readings

[h.t. Ted McClure]