Hittites

The Hittites (/ˈhɪtaɪts/) were an Anatolian people who played an important role in establishing an empire centered on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia around 1600 BC. This empire reached its height during the mid-14th century BC under Suppiluliuma I, when it encompassed an area that included most of Anatolia as well as parts of the northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia.

Quotes

• The word Khatti, which means Hittite may possibly be connected with Sanskrit Kshatriya and Pali Khattiyo.
  • D.D. Kosabmi, The Culture and Civilization of Ancient India. 1965. Quoted in Karpasa, and Talageri : The Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism (1993)

• (The Hittite language) cannot be accepted without qualification as Aryan. ... The deviations in the inflection are puzzlingly numerous. ... Again the number of Indo-European words and stems identified in the vocabulary is but small. Finally, the syntax remains essentially un- Aryan... Now if these documents dated from the 14th century AD, few would hesitate to declare that they were written in an Indo-European language and explain the discrepancies as due to the familiar phenomena of decay, assimilation of forms, and foreign borrowing. But the texts... are many centuries older than the oldest written memorials of Sanskrit or Greek. Yet their language diverges from the hypothetical original Aryan tongue far more than Greek or Sanskrit differs from the parent speech or from one another. It is a fact impossible to believe that a truly Indo-European language would look so odd in the 14th century before our era.
  • Childe, The Aryans. quoted in S. Talageri, The Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism (1993)

• It has often been remarked - and not without reason - that although the grammar of the Anatolian languages would be recognizably Indo-European, the vocabulary would be less so. This is usually attributed to the deeply penetrating influences exercised by strange surroundings not only while the Anatolians were en route, but also after their arrival in Anatolia.
  • H.J. Houwinkten Cate in Encyclopedia Britannica, quoted in Talageri, The Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism (1993)

• [The Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology points out that nothing is known about the original Indo-European gods of the Hittites, with the sole exception of one god, Inar, whom the encyclopedia actually describes as] " a God who had come from India with the Indo-European Hittites."
  • Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology quoted in Talageri, The Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism (1993), p. 128

• While the reading of the inscriptions by Hrozny and other scholars has almost conclusively shown that they spoke an Indo-European language, their physical type is clearly Mongoloid, as is shown by their representations both on their own sculptures and on Egyptian monuments. They had high cheek-bones and retreating foreheads.
  • CARNOY 1919: Pre-Aryan Origins of the Persian Perfect. Carnoy Albert J. pp. 117-121 in The Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol.39, 1919.(CARNOY 1919:117).

• The location of the Anatolian branch of IE (Hittite and its sisters) is a problem, or at least a puzzle, for IE homeland studies. The Anatolian languages are attested very early in Asia Minor, removed from Europe and far from the steppe; Gamkrelidze and Ivanov ... offer as a strength the ability of their proposed homelands to account for the location of Hittite with minimal migration. Alternatively or additionally, the location of Tocharian—attested in the early centuries AD well to the east of most IE territory in present-day Xinkiang (Chinese Turkestan)—is a problem or a puzzle... Accounting for the locations of both Hittite and Tocharian is usually presented, at least rhetorically, as a major problem.
  • Johanna Nichols NICHOLS. 1998. The Eurasian spread zone and the Indo-European dispersal. in : Blench, R., & Spriggs, M. (2012). Archaeology and Language II: Archaeological Data and Linguistic Hypotheses. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis.