The People Before the Hittites
In Central Anatolia, before the rise of the famous Hittite Empire, lived the Hattians. Flourishing in the Early Bronze Age, from roughly 2500 to 2000 BCE, their culture was centered around cities like Hattush, the future Hittite capital. The Hattians did not have their own writing system. Our knowledge of them and their language comes entirely from the records of their successors, the Hittites, an Indo-European-speaking people who arrived around 2000 BCE and gradually absorbed the Hattian population over the next few centuries. The Hittites adopted the name of the land, "Hatti," but spoke a completely different language they called Nešili. In preserving their own culture using Mesopotamian cuneiform script, the Hittite scribes also unintentionally created a fossil record of the lost Hattian tongue.
A Language Without a Family
The Hattian language, or hattili as the Hittites called it, is a language isolate. This means it has no demonstrated genetic relationship to any other known language family, including the Indo-European Hittite language that replaced it. The entire corpus of the language consists of about 150 short specimens found on Hittite clay tablets, many of them bilingual religious texts from the 14th and 13th centuries BCE. Hittite priests would insert the note "the priest is now speaking in Hattic" before reciting ancient liturgical formulas.