These are the ruins of Hattusa, a capital city of the ancient Hittite Empire (1650-1200 BCE) located in modern Turkey. This week, archaeologists revealed that they had discovered a language that no one had even known existed.
In our modern world, where languages are rapidly disappearing (linguists say that if things proceed at current levels, 90% of all spoken languages will become extinct in the next 100 years), this is welcome news.
Hattusha — now the Bogazköy-Hattusha UNESCO World Heritage Site — has been studied intensively for the last 100 years, due to the cultural significance of the ruins there. About 30,000 Clay cuneiform tablets have been unearthed, almost all in the Hittite language.
Turns out, the Hittites had a thing for recording other languages, particularly the religious rituals of different cultures. This new language would have been recorded by the scribes of the Hittite king, and surrounding epigraphy on the tablet with the newly discovered language states that it is the language of the land of Kalasma (northwest modern Turkey).
Unlike Indiana Jones, actual scholars need time to decode new languages, so the Kalasmic text has yet to be translated.
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