Anatolian peoples

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The Anatolians were

Anatolian Peninsula in present-day Turkey, identified by their use of the Anatolian languages.[1] These peoples were among the oldest Indo-European ethnolinguistic groups and one of the most archaic, because Anatolians were among the first Indo-European peoples to separate from the Proto-Indo-European community that gave origin to the individual Indo-European peoples.[2][1]

History

Origins

Indo-European migrations as described in The Horse, the Wheel, and Language by David W. Anthony
Map 1: Anatolian peoples in 2nd millennium BC; Blue: Luwians, Yellow: Hittites, Red: Palaics.

Together with the

chariots for war.[3][7] Comparison of Hittite agricultural terms with those of other Indo-European subgroups indicates that the Anatolian peoples seceded from the other Indo-Europeans before the establishment of a common agricultural nomenclature, which suggests that they entered the Near East as a cohesive people through a common route.[5]

The Anatolian peoples were intruders in an area in which the local population had already founded cities, established literate bureaucracies and established kingdoms and palace cults.[2] Once they entered the region, the cultures of the local populations, in particular the Hattians, significantly influenced them linguistically, politically and religiously.[5] Christopher I. Beckwith suggests that the Anatolian peoples initially gained a foothold in Anatolia after being hired by the Hattians to fight other invading Indo-European groups.[6]

Bronze Age

Asia Minor
(circa 1200 BC) with main settlements.
Hittite Empire
.

The earliest linguistic and historical attestation of the Anatolian peoples are names mentioned in

Kanesh.[6][8] Kanesh was at the time the center of a network of Assyrian merchants overseeing trade between Assyria and the warring states of Anatolia. This certainly increased the power of the Anatolian peoples who inhabited the city.[2]

The Hittites are by far the best known of the Anatolian peoples. Originally referring to themselves as the Neshites after their capital at Kanesh, which they had at one point captured from the Hatti, the Hittites then seized the Hattic capital of Hattusa. The Hittite language thereafter gradually supplanted Hattic as the predominant language in Anatolia.[1] Uniting several independent Hattic kingdoms in Anatolia the Hittites began establishing a Middle Eastern empire in the 17th-century BC.[2] They sacked Babylon, seized Assyrian cities and fought the Egyptian Empire to a standstill at the Battle of Kadesh, the greatest chariot battle of the ancient world.[2] Their empire disappeared with the Late Bronze Age collapse in the 12th-century BC. As Hittite was a language of the elite, the language disappeared with the empire.[2]

Another Anatolian group was the Luwians, who migrated to south-west Anatolia in the early Bronze Age.[9] Unlike Hittite, the Luwian language does not contain loanwords from Hattic, indicating that it was initially spoken in western Anatolia.[2] The Luwians inhabited a large area and their language was spoken after the collapse of the Hittite Empire.[2]

Neo-Hittites were overwhelmingly Luwians and not Hittites
).

The least known Anatolian group were the

Palaic peoples, who inhabited the region of Pala in northern Anatolia.[9] This area had probably also previously been inhabited by the Hatti. It is likely that Palaic peoples disappeared with the invasion of the Kaskians in the 15th-century BC.[10]

Iron Age

Asia Minor
in the Greco-Roman period. The classical regions and their main settlements (circa 200 BC).

Following the

Late Antiquity
, with funerary inscriptions recorded for as late as the 5th century AD.

Culture

Law

The better known

laws of the Anatolian peoples were the Hittite laws that were formulated as case laws
. These laws were organized in groups according to their subject (in eight main groups). Hittite laws show an aversion to the
death penalty
was applied.

See also

References

Citations

  1. ^ a b c d Mallory 1997, pp. 12–16
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h Anthony 2007, pp. 43–48
  3. ^ a b Beckwith 2009, p. 32
  4. ^ Hock & Joseph 1996, pp. 520–521
  5. ^
    Encyclopædia Britannica Online
    . Retrieved July 2, 2018.
  6. ^ a b c Beckwith 2009, pp. 37–39
  7. ^ Anthony 2007, pp. 64–65
  8. ^ Fortson, IV 2011, p. 48
  9. ^
    Encyclopædia Britannica Online
    . Retrieved July 3, 2018.
  10. . The Palaic peoples were very quickly overwhelmed by the invasions of the Kaskas, a non-IE people from the East, who swept them away and for centuries kept attacking the Hittite kingdom

Sources

Further reading