Boğazköy Cuneiform Tablets

The best-known group of finds from Hattusa is the cuneiform clay tablets recovered from the city’s archives. Much of what is known about the political, religious, administrative and legal documents of the Hittite state comes from them. For the course of the excavations see the history of the Hattusa excavations, and for the city itself see Hattuşaş.

How many tablets are there?

The figure varies between sources and is updated as fragments are joined:

• UNESCO’s Memory of the World entry: the archive totals nearly 25,000 tablets.
• Cem Karasu (paper of 1995): nearly 25,000 tablets, adding that most were found as broken fragments and that the number can change as pieces are joined.
• The 2017 promotional book of the Çorum Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism and entries in the Türkiye Tourism Encyclopedia: more than 30,000 tablets and fragments.

For the first excavation period (1906-1912), Karasu gives about 10,400 tablets and fragments, the Tourism Encyclopedia more than ten thousand.

Where were they found?

According to Nermin Atila’s (2021) entry in the Türkiye Tourism Encyclopedia, tablets of archive and library character come from the following places:

• Great Temple: rooms 10, 11 and 12; rituals, festivals, mythology, prayers, divination, law, treaties, historical texts and vocabulary lists.
• Yamaç Evi (Slope House): an administrative building; rituals, divination, festivals, mythology, epics, annals, vocabulary lists and laws.
• Büyükkale: buildings A, K, E and D of the royal palace; building A with rituals, festivals, divination, laws, medical and literary texts and tablet inventories; building E with treaties and letters; building K mostly religious texts, one tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh and royal annals; building D with 280 bullae and documents of the Middle Hittite period.
• Nişantepe: 28 sealed tablets and 3,268 bullae (Hittite seals).
• Temples of the Upper City: tablet fragments in temples 8, 12, 15, 16 and 26, most dated to the Old and Middle Hittite periods.

Atila writes that the tablets give information on the Hittite state between 1650 and 1200 BCE and date to the Old Hittite, Middle Hittite and Empire periods.

In which languages?

According to Atila the documents are written in Hittite, Sumerian, Akkadian, Hurrian, Hattic, Luwian and Palaic. Karasu summarises the variety this way: Luwian and Palaic belong to the Indo-European family like Hittite; Hurrian shows no linguistic kinship with Hittite; Akkadian was the diplomatic language of the age; and the Hittite texts include passages in the language of the Hattians, who lived in Anatolia before the Hittites. Because vocabulary-like tablets in Hittite-Sumerian-Akkadian-Hurrian were found, Karasu also describes the archive as a library in the modern sense.

Contents

The genres Karasu lists include royal annals, political treaties and letters, legal texts, administrative instructions, mythological texts, prayers, rituals and festival texts, and divination and magic texts. The colophons at the end of the tablets usually give the tablet’s number in a series, whether the text is complete, the scribe’s name and sometimes the scribe’s lineage and supervisor; among Karasu’s examples are notes such as “the third tablet is not finished”.

The Treaty of Kadesh

Atila (2026) and the Türkiye Tourism Encyclopedia (Yılmaz, 2019) write that among the tablets found in the 1906 excavation was the Akkadian version of the treaty concluded between the Egyptian king Ramesses II and Hattusili III; Winckler translated the tablet. The draft Hattusa site management plan of the Middle Black Sea Development Agency notes that the tablet can be seen in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum and that a copy is displayed in front of the United Nations General Assembly building in New York.

The decipherment of Hittite and the tablets’ journey

According to the Türkiye Tourism Encyclopedia, the German Oriental Society sent Bedrich Hrozný to Istanbul in 1914 to study the tablets; at a lecture in Berlin on 19 November 1915 Hrozný announced that he understood most of Hittite and that the language belonged to the Indo-European group. Atila (2026) writes that the first Hittite grammar appeared in 1917 and that more than ten thousand tablets and fragments were sent to Berlin for restoration between January and April 1916. According to the same entry, pieces whose study was complete were returned to Türkiye before the Second World War, and the part that remained in East Berlin was recovered only in 1987.

Atila (2021) writes that tablets from Hattusa are held in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum, the Ankara Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, the Çorum Museum and the Boğazköy Museum; for current displays see the Boğazköy Museum and the Çorum Museum.

Memory of the World

The Boğazköy tablets were registered on UNESCO’s Memory of the World International Register in 2001; see Hattusa as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and Memory of the World. For the second great Hittite archive in Çorum, read the Šapinuwa excavations and the Ortaköy archive.

Sources

• Nermin Atila (2021), “Hattuşa Çivi Yazılı Tablet Arşivleri ve Kütüphaneleri” (Cuneiform Tablet Archives and Libraries of Hattusa), Online Türkiye Turizm Ansiklopedisi. https://turkiyeturizmansiklopedisi.com/hattusa-civi-yazili-tablet-arsivleri-ve-kutuphaneleri
• Nermin Atila, “Osmanlı Arşivine Göre Boğazköy: Arkeolojik Çalışmaları ve Sosyo-Ekonomik Tarihi”, Karadeniz Araştırmaları, XXIII/91, pp. 1830-1846. https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/5985702
• Cem Karasu, “Hattusa-Boğazköy Arşiv-Kitaplık Sistemleri Üzerine Bazı Yorumlar” (Some Remarks on the Archive-Library Systems of Hattusa-Boğazköy; paper given at the Çorum symposium, 21-23 July 1995). https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/771323
• UNESCO Memory of the World, “The Hittite cuneiform tablets from Bogazköy”. https://www.unesco.org/en/memory-world/hittite-cuneiform-tablets-bogazkoy
• Ali İzzet Yılmaz (2019) and Celal Şenol (2024), “Boğazköy (Hattuşa) Örenyeri”, Online Türkiye Turizm Ansiklopedisi. https://turkiyeturizmansiklopedisi.com/bogazkoy-hattusa-orenyeri
• Çorum Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism, İlkler İmparatorluğu’nun Başkenti Hattuşa, 2017. https://engelsiz.ktb.gov.tr/Eklenti/62253,turkcebaskikkkpdf.pdf
• Middle Black Sea Development Agency (OKA), “Hattuşa: Hitit Başkenti Alan Yönetim Planı, Analiz Çalışması (Taslak)”. https://oka.gov.tr/assets/upload/dosyalar/hattusa-ayp_29112024_alan-analizi.pdf

Frequently asked questions

How many cuneiform tablets were found at Boğazköy?

The number depends on the source: UNESCO's Memory of the World entry speaks of nearly 25,000 tablets, while the promotional book of the Çorum Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism and the Türkiye Tourism Encyclopedia say more than 30,000. The figure can change as broken fragments are joined.

In which languages are the tablets written?

According to the Türkiye Tourism Encyclopedia: Hittite, Sumerian, Akkadian, Hurrian, Hattic, Luwian and Palaic; some tablets are bilingual, Akkadian-Hittite or Hurrian-Hittite.

Where was the tablet of the Treaty of Kadesh found?

Atila (2026), drawing on Ottoman archival documents, writes that the Akkadian version of the treaty came to light in the first Boğazköy excavation of 1906 and was translated by Hugo Winckler.