New Hittite archive from Turkey reveals an empire at war

Archaeologists digging at Kayalıpınar in Turkey's Sivas province have recovered 131 clay tablets and fragments from a new Hittite archive dating to the reign of King Tudhaliya II, who ruled around 1400 BC. Turkey's Minister of Culture and Tourism announced the discovery on social media, with a ministry statement adding the details. Combined with the previous season's finds, the royal archive at the site now counts nearly two hundred pieces.

What makes this Hittite archive remarkable is not its size but its subject matter. Among the texts are a general's desperate plea for reinforcements, records of a fever epidemic that moved from city to city and struck children and babies hardest, and a travel diary kept by priests who read omens in the flight of birds. The tablets are written in Hittite and in Hurrian, a neighboring language that carried great weight in Hittite religion, and they deal with affairs of state, war, ritual and the life of the royal family, as reported by La Brújula Verde.

What the Hittite archive says about a royal court in crisis

The most striking group of texts is also the most human. Among the divination records, letters, rituals and prayers are descriptions of an epidemic of high fever that spread from settlement to settlement and hit the young hardest. The court tracked the health of royal children and the children of senior officials through divination, effectively asking the gods how each sick child would fare. The minister summed up the find by saying the tablets carry "traces of a high-fever epidemic" that particularly affected infants, according to the ministry's announcement.

The most moving case is that of a baby princess who was still being nursed. One group of texts tries to work out her future with obvious concern, another tablet notes that she died and describes the funeral rites held for her, and a letter from a diviner to the king says she had fallen ill in a city called Ziulila, whose location is unknown. The Hittites are best known for a different, later epidemic, the Plague Prayers of Mursili II, which blamed contagion on Egyptian prisoners, but nothing published so far links the two outbreaks, and the new statement does not say what disease was involved.

The Hittite archive is also a war diary

A letter sent from western Anatolia to the king, who was based at Samuha at the time, reports that Hittite territory was hemmed in by its enemies. The commanders asked for troops, horses and war chariots so they could defeat them, and warned that without support the army would be destroyed, adding that they would not answer for the consequences if no help came. The official summary does not name the enemy, and it is not known whether the king replied or whether any reinforcements ever set out. Historians know that Hittite kings fought repeated wars in western Anatolia against a coalition of states called Arzawa, and that Tudhaliya II led campaigns there.

Why this Hittite archive matters

A third group of texts reads almost like a diary kept by a party of augurs, the officials known as lumusen who held a recognized post in the administration. They left Samuha and traveled through several regions, and the tablet lists the cities where they stayed, the routes they took and the birds they saw. According to the ministry, the documents contain previously unknown details about how such signs were judged and interpreted. The Hittite archive has been growing steadily: the site has been yielding tablets since 2005, and since 2021 the dig has been led by archaeologist Cigdem Maner of Koc University in Istanbul. Last season's finds had already included tablets recording diviners' questions about the futures of princes and princesses, something Maner described at the time as new for Kayalıpınar, according to HeritageDaily.

Kayalıpınar itself has a long resume. Ancient texts know the place as Samuha, a first-rank Hittite city that served as a base of operations in the fourteenth century BC, when mountain peoples from the north were raiding the kingdom's heartland. Its temple of the Night Goddess, a form of Ishtar, made it a religious hub, and a few generations later the city supplied the young priest who became Hattusili III, the king who signed the peace treaty with Egypt's Ramesses II. A recently found piece of that very treaty was covered in a related report on The Old World, and readers can compare the two discoveries in the account of the Kadesh treaty fragment found at Hattusa.

The ministry, following the excavation team's assessment, calls this the most extensive Hittite-language archive uncovered in the current century. That claim deserves a caveat: the archives of Hattusa, excavated since the early 1900s, hold tens of thousands of tablets. This Hittite archive's value lies elsewhere, in a concentrated mix of divination texts, letters, rituals and prayers from a single reign, offering a snapshot of how one court governed and worshipped at one moment. Several questions remain open: no scientific study with full translations has been published yet, so everything known comes from the announcement; the disease behind the epidemic is unidentified; and specialists will need years to read, translate and publish the tablets one by one.

For readers, the Hittite archive is a reminder that the Bronze Age was not only battles and monuments, but worried parents, overwhelmed generals and priests reading birds to make sense of it all. When the translations arrive, they may be the most intimate voice yet from an empire that ruled Anatolia some three millennia before the modern age.