Introduction

There has been considerable confusion recently about how certain languages came to be established as members of the Indo-European family. In this chapter we take up the cases that have been discussed most, setting the record straight and deriving methodological object lessons from these successes. The methods used to establish these as Indo-European languages are quite instructive. Specifically we examine how Hittite, Armenian, and Venetic were shown to belong to the Indo-European family. (For Indo-European more broadly, see Chapters 2, 3, and 4.)

Hittite

Hittite was the language of the ancient Hittite empire in central Anatolia (present-day Turkey), and came to be known from the many clay tablets, written in cuneiform (and the earliest of these in Hieroglyphic Hittite), some from Tel el-Amarna in Egypt, but mostly known from the libraries containing Hittite and other clay documents in Boğaz Köy (today called Boğaz Kale), Turkey. Ultimately these were deciphered. Hittite (and the Anatolian branch generally to which Hittite belongs) proved to be Indo-European, against earlier intuitions. The first substantive claims concerning the Indo-European affiliation of Hittite were made by Knudtzon (1902) (cf. also Bugge 1902 and Torp 1902) in a book devoted to two letters between a Hittite ruler and the king of Egypt found at Tel el-Amarna in Egypt.