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.
From these fragments, linguists have determined that Hattian was an agglutinative language. It relied heavily on prefixes to build grammatical meaning, a structure fundamentally different from the suffix-heavy grammar of Indo-European Hittite. For instance, Hattian appears to have formed plurals with a le- prefix and collective plurals with a fa- prefix, such as fa-shaf ("the gods"). While scholars have proposed tentative links to the Northwest Caucasian language family (like Abkhaz) and others, these connections remain speculative and unproven within mainstream linguistics.
The main linguistic legacy of the Hattians is the collection of loanwords they introduced into the Hittite language. These words are almost exclusively religious or cultic. The Hittites adopted much of the Hattian pantheon, along with their names. The Hattian storm god, Taru, became the Hittite Tarhun. The sun goddess Wurunšemu was venerated as the sun goddess of Arinna, a main deity of the Hittite state. Other loanwords include names for temple officials, ritual items, and mythological figures, like the dragon Illuyanka. These words, preserved in a foreign script and spoken by a different people, are the last records of the Hattian world.