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This is not correct because we don't know what the Hittites called themselves. This civilization, when it was found, was named after the Biblical tribe. There is no relation established between the two.

The Bible is not proper documentation of the Hittites. All the texts that mention the Hittites post-date the fall of the empire based out of Ḫattuša by centuries. It's an open question whether the Hittites of the Bible refer to Ḫattuša or "Neo-Hittites" better described as Luwian-Aramean.

My Hittite language class went online during COVID and switched from studying royal annals to the Plague Prayers of Muršili II. One of the most enlightening parts of studying the ancient world is seeing that even in very alien cultures separated by millennia, we're all just people.

And they support RSS! Albeit through WordPress but nobody's perfect

That would be Amarna Letters 41-44.

A quotation from a letter sent by Ankhesenamun, Tutankhamun's widow, to Hittite king Šuppiluliuma I was found in Ḫattuša. Ankhesenamun asked Šuppiluliuma to send her one of her sons to marry her and become king of Egypt. Šuppiluliuma initially thinks this is a ruse, but the story eventually checks out and Šuppiluliuma sends a son. That son is killed on his journey and a war between Egypt and Ḫattuša ensues.

> A lot of the surviving tablets are begging letters asking the Egyptians for gold. We even have some practice tablets from teaching Egyptian scribes to do this.

I'm imagining a class on "begging for gold" being given to young Egyptian scribes.

It looks like this is fairly late in Hittite's evolution, though, 14th century BCE.

Clarity about relationship with the rest of PIE would definitely be enhanced by having a corpus from substantially earlier on.

Ah Erdoğan's west facing mouthpiece.

What about it?

Most tablets were air dried, which would take a day or two. But some tablets were fired - dried in a kiln. I don't know about Hittites but at least in Mesopotamia, air drying was by far the most common method and only some important ones were fired. So methods were certainly available to dry a tablet quickly if necessary but I doubt if air drying delays made much of a difference. Messages and goods were limited to the speed of horse after all.

It's not like they had to wait for the clay to dry, and then sent the message via email over fiber optic cable. It would take days to reach the palace. Drying it (maybe in a small kiln?) first was a small part of the delay.

We've already seen this happen in the land of cuneiform. In the first millennium BCE, Akkadian cuneiform on tablets was replaced by Aramaic written on papyrus and vellum. The cuneiform survives in large quantity, the Aramaic barely at all. The Story of Aḥiqar, for example, comes from Mesopotamia and the only copy that survives in the original language somehow found its way to Elephantine in Egypt where the climate allowed it to (barely) survive. It puts Assyriologists in a weird position where there's plenty of textual documentation of earlier eras but far, far less in later eras. We're left with odd situations like the best documentation we have of Nebuchadnezzar II's reign coming from the Bible because the Bible got copied and the Babylonian texts that might provide a different emic perspective did not.

"The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to develop a contemporary version of the historic Rosetta Stone. Run by the Long Now Foundation, the project aims to create a survey and near-permanent archive of 1,500 languages that can enable comparative linguistic research and education and might help recover or revitalize lost languages in the future." --from the Wikipedia description of the Rosetta Project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Project

They can just ask you, you'll live on in the weights of the future models.

Isn't that one of the driving forces behind research like Project Silica? Sure, it won't capture everything that everyone produces, but the 'important stuff' can be preserved for millennia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage

We have those CDs made of stone we could use! That's sorta a stone .. thing.

https://blog.archive.org/2025/10/29/a-peek-inside-the-physic...

The text says "a nursing baby," meaning the infant was being nursed, not that she was nursing a baby.

Seems like a fault of your English language parsing ability. Though deliberately misinterpreting grammar as you've done is a common type of joke that I appreciate.