Page:The Hittite Language (1921).djvu/2

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196
Maurice Bloomfield

it is quite certain that the Boghazköi inscriptions are closely related to the two Arzawa letters found among the Tel-el-Amarna tablets, containing correspondence between the Pharaoh Amenhotep iii and the Arzawa potentate Tarhundaraba. Just what Arzawa is—Cilicia, Commagene, Cyprus—has remained uncertain. It was near Hatti; its relationship with Hittite cannot be questioned; and Hrozný uses its evidence on a familiar par with Hittite. In fact, Hrozný may be said to start with certain results or assumptions regarding the character of Arzawa which were made by Knudtzon (supplemented by Bugge and Torp) in his monograf on the Arzawa letters in 1902.[1] Thus the forms u-i-e-nu-un and up-pa-ah-hu-un are explained by Hrozný (p. 127), after Knudtzon (pp. 54, 55), as preterites first sing. act., both in the sense of, ‘I have sent.’[2]

Since the appearance of Hrozný’s Language of the Hittites there have been further important developments. First, I may mention an inscription which contains Sanskrit words, especially the odd numerals from one to seven in the forms aika, tiera, panza, and šatta, in close vicinity to the cuneiform signs of these numerals by wedge count.[3] They occur in composition with a word vartana, again obviously Sanskritic, as epithets of horses in a sort of ἱππική composed by ‘Kikkuli[4] from the land Mittani’, and lend obvious support to the four much-discussed names of Vedic gods (Mitra, Varuṇa, Indra, and the Nāsatyas), discovered long ago by Hugo Winckler.[5] Dr. Forrer thinks that these Sanskrit traces are to be assigned to the ‘Urinder’, whose original home he places on the right bank of the river Kur (Cyrus) up to the Kaspian sea, and that they crossed the Kaukasus into

    Indo-Européen de la Langue Hittite, Christiania, 1919, in which the author with even greater assurance treats the same language as Indo-European. His explanations of the fenomena often differ markedly from Hrozný’s. Cf. also Ferdinand Sommer, ‘Hethitisches’, in Boghazköi-Studien, 4. Heft = iii. Stück, 1. Lieferung (1920), p. 1.

  1. Die zwei Arzawa-Briefe, die ältesten Urkunden in indogermanischer Sprache, Leipzig, 1902.
  2. Cf. Arzawa-Briefe, pp. 132, 133.
  3. * See Jensen, Sitzungsber. d. preuss. Akad., 1919, pp. 367 ff.; Ferdinand Sommer, ‘Hethitisches’, pp. 2ff. (Boghazköi-Studien, 4. Heft = iii. Stück, 1. Lieferung).
  4. The name calls up sharply Kilikia.
  5. Mittheilungen der Deutschen Orient-gesellschaft, No. 35.