Some Groups of Ancient Anatolian Proper Names

Ever since it was discovered that Hittite, the language in which the bulk of the cuneiform tablets from Boğazköy is composed, is an Indo-European language or a language related to Indo-European, historians and linguists alike have been interested in the question as to the time when these people entered Asia Minor. The tablets were mostly written between 1400 and 1200 b.c., but the history of the Hittite state can be traced back to about 1900 b.c.; at that time, at the latest, Hittites must have been present in Anatolia. The problem of their origin has been complicated by the fact that the Hittite language is not isolated in the peninsula, but forms part of an ‘Anatolian’ group of languages to which Luwian and Palaic—likewise attested in the Boğazköy material—and furthermore the language of the inscriptions written in Hittite hieroglyphs also belong. The latter can at present be traced back to the middle of the 2nd millennium but for the most part cover the early centuries of the 1st millennium.