A Czech linguistic genius with a lasting legacy: Bedřich Hrozný, the decipherer of Hittite
On the 12th of December 1952, a senior academic died in Prague. This lifelong scholar was Bedřich Hrozný, a Czech man born in the Bohemian town of Lysá nad Labem, and he remains famous today for his work on ancient languages. Most notably, it was thanks to him that the first translations of the lost language of the Hittites were not into English or French, but Czech. To understand the genius and the legacy of Hrozný, Danny Bate spoke to Krishnan Ram-Prasad, a scholar of Hittite and other languages of antiquity at the University of Oxford.
I think it's best to start at the beginning with Bedřich Hrozný, so let's talk a little bit about his early life. Into what world was he born? And where would you say he began his academic journey?
“So Hrozný was born in 1879 in Bohemia, which was at the time a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so a pretty different world from ours. He studied at the University of Vienna and also at Humboldt University in Berlin. He was Czech, and therefore spoke Czech, but also German, and that was how he was able to study at these German-speaking universities.
“While at university, he learned an incredible number of languages as a young man. These included Akkadian, Aramaic, Ethiopian, Sumerian and Sanskrit, and a selection of languages written in the cuneiform script, which had already been deciphered at the time, having been found in places like Mesopotamia and Persia.
"While at university, he learned an incredible number of languages as a young man."
“As far as the field of linguistics goes, this was a very exciting time, when some major discoveries were made about the history of languages and their relatedness to one another. It was an incredibly fertile time to be learning ancient languages and studying in Central Europe.
You use the word “linguist” there – is it right to describe him as an archaeologist as well? He wasn't just staying within these prestigious universities. He was quite literally out in the field!
“Yes, that's quite right. Hrozný took part in several excavations in places in the Middle East. That was how he got involved with the decipherment of Hittite in the first place, but it wasn't limited to that area. He was constantly out there both as a young man in the early twentieth century and also later in life.”
Now you mentioned there the language that he is most closely associated with, which is Hittite. Could you just give us the basic facts of this language? Who spoke this language, and when did they speak it?
“So Hittite was a language spoken in the area known as Anatolia, which roughly corresponds to the modern-day state of Turkey. Our earliest records date to about 1800 BCE, and the latest Hittite texts are from around 1200 BCE, so it's attested for about six hundred years in the second millennium. It doesn't have any modern descendants; Turkish, for example, is from a completely different language family. But Hittite is related to other ‘Indo-European’ languages, which include English and Czech. It’s a bit like a great-great-great-great uncle of those languages.
"Hittite is related to other ‘Indo-European’ languages, which include English and Czech. It’s a bit like a great-great-great-great uncle of those languages."
“It was spoken in a place which is called Hattusa, now in modern-day Boğazkale in Turkey. That's where the excavations first unearthed the language. It was written in cuneiform, a script used to write down many languages from that period of time and that area. Actually, the Hittites adopted the script from their linguistic neighbours, especially the Akkadians and the Sumerians, who had been using it for already over a thousand years before Hittite was written down.”
Hittite was a very different language to those that you just mentioned, which Hrozný would have already been familiar with. Could you tell us about how he came to know Hittite? What was the step-by-step journey towards being the first decipherer, or rather the first modern translator of this language?
“So, in order to answer this question, we first have to understand how languages can be related. That's key to how Hrozný actually deciphered Hittite.
“If you imagine a situation like the case of Latin, which was one language, but over time its speakers broke off into different areas after the collapse of the Roman Empire, and so different groups of speakers emerged with different languages. We now call these romance languages – Spanish, Italian, French, etc. We can see that these languages are related by looking at core vocabulary, and also at what we call phonological correspondence. That basically means that one sound in one language always shows up as a different sound in a different language, but in a very systematic way.
“That's Latin and the Romance languages, but the Indo-European family, which I mentioned before, contains a huge number of languages – about five hundred languages, including Latin and by extension its descendants, but also Greek, Sanskrit, Germanic languages and also Slavic languages. The Indo-European language family by the time of Hrozný was well established. People were able to say some things about the ‘proto-language’, the common ancestor language of the Indo-European family.
“Now, the reason why Hittite was not easy to be deciphered in the first place is that most of the languages surrounding that area were not Indo-European languages, so languages like Akkadian and Sumerian were not related. This meant that when scholars read the cuneiform tablets that were written in Hittite (not that they knew that's what it was at that time), they couldn't understand them in the context that they found them. Nevertheless, because they knew the script that was cuneiform, they could write out some of the sound values.
“The story goes that while Hrozný was looking at these he found a sentence pronounced along of the lines of “nu NINDA-an ezzatteni watar-ma ekutteni”. On its own, that doesn't make a huge amount of sense, but the key here was the symbol that I pronounced as “NINDA”. It wasn’t actually pronounced like that. Rather, it’s a type of symbol that we call a logogram, which represents a single idea or word, rather than sounds. We know from Sumerian that that symbol and word meant ‘bread’. So we have a word for ‘bread’ and then something like “ezzatteni”.
“Hrozný had the ingenious idea to think ‘well, what are the kind of words that are associated with bread?’ One of the things we tend to do is eat it. Then, if you think about that, ezzatteni. That has some correspondences with Indo-European words for ‘eat’, like the English word eat or Sanskrit ádmi or Latin edo. So, Hrozný hypothesised that ezzatteni is a verb and it means ‘eat’, perhaps ‘you will eat’ or ‘you eat bread’.
“The word immediately after ezzatteni is watar. Now that's for an English-speaker improbably close to our word water, and to Czech voda. So, he thought, ‘well, if we have eating bread and then we have water, something to do with water, what could ekutteni mean but ‘drink’?’ He decided that the sentence meant something along the lines of ‘now you will eat bread and you will drink water’. Once it was then established that Hittite was an Indo-European language, he could then compare it to the other Indo-European languages to discover more about its vocabulary. The rest is history.”
And just how significant has his translation of Hittite been? Speaking as somebody working within this field, would you say that you’re still living within the legacy of Hrozný, in how he expanded idea of the Indo-European language family?
“Within the field of Indo-European linguistics, it really can't be overstated how important Hrozný’s work has been. Hittite, as I mentioned, is attested from around 1800 BCE. That is well before any other ancient Indo-European language; even the oldest documents in Greek are still several hundred years later than that. This means that, for those of us who are interested in reconstructing the history of his language family, Hittite is an invaluable resource.
“Languages change constantly. Therefore, the older a language is, generally speaking, the closer it's going to be to a hypothesised ancestor. So for Indo-European linguistics, it was incredibly important. But also, what we've discovered about Hittite subsequently is that it has a very different structure in some ways from Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, the otherwise oldest languages in this family. That's forced us to reconsider a lot about their shared ancestor, Proto-Indo-European.
“It's also forced us to understand a bit more about the relations within the Indo-European family tree – which languages are closer together than others, and at what point speakers broke off into different branches. Especially now, this is being combined with archaeological evidence to give a profile of what the migration patterns were like at this point in time in prehistory. The linguistic evidence is a vital part of that.
“So that's the linguistic side of things, but it's not just historical linguistics that has been informed by a Hittite. Actually, the Hittites were an incredibly important civilisation historically. They were competitors and partners with the Egyptian Empire, and in fact the oldest surviving peace treaty in the world was between Ramesses II of Egypt and Ḫattušili III of the Hittites. The treaty itself is known to us and was known before the decipherment of Hittite, because there is a version in Egyptian hieroglyphs at Thebes, and a version that is written in Akkadian, which was a sort of lingua franca at the time. But what the Hittite documents convey to us is a substantial amount of information about the law codes, the customs and the ritual practices of these people, who we know played such an important role at that time and in that place, but who previously had been obscure to us.”
I find this so interesting; it's like doing archaeology, but without getting your hands dirty, just digging into the history of words themselves! Just to be clear, the Hittites also may be known to people more widely, because they appear in the Bible, right?
“They are in the Bible, although it's not immediately clear to us that the Hittites mentioned in the Bible are necessarily the same people as those who wrote the cuneiform tablets in Hattusa. Nevertheless the civilisation has been conceived of for thousands of years before we had any evidence of these documents.”
So ‘Hittite’ itself might not be a great or particularly accurate name for this people then? A name that they themselves may not have recognised?
“Yes, that's true. They seem to have called themselves ‘the people of Hatti’, and that's where the name of Hattusa comes from. But Hittite is an example of what we call exonyms – words that people who are not part of a speech community use to refer to those other people. It’s like referring to Germans as Germans rather than Deutsche.
Bringing our conversation back to Hrozný himself, what can you tell us about his later life? Everything we've just mentioned is happening in the 1910s, but he lives for many decades longer, dying in 1952. Does he have any further successes in historical linguistics?
“Yes, Hrozný spent his whole life dedicated to decipherment. It’s hard to top deciphering probably the most important linguistic resource for Indo-European in a generation, but he continued to work on a language which we later were able to diagnose as Luwian, a language closely related to Hittite. In this case, it was written in a hieroglyphic script. Now Hrozný, it must be said, didn't quite come to the final conclusion about Luwian. That wouldn't happen until some decades after his death, but he worked tirelessly on trying to decipher these symbols. He used and use the kind of methods that he developed with Hittite to find out more about other languages in ancient Anatolia.
“He was also more generally a very senior academic. He founded an academic journal, the Archiv Orientální, which still exists today. He went on to become the rector of Charles University in Prague, and at a very interesting and challenging time historically, in 1939. There's a story that he was the rector at the time that the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia, and he actually intervened to protect some students who were hiding on the campus from the officers, by warning them in his perfect German that they had no legal right to pursue students on the campus.
"It's really quite incredible what his contribution has been to this field.”
“At that point in time, the university was closed, but Hrozný’s efforts had never been interrupted by war. In fact, he actually did a lot of his work on Hittite while on active service during the First World War. He was very much a man of many talents.”
Finally, we've talked already about Hrozný’s legacy, but personally, is he somebody that you admire?
“I have to confess as someone who has dedicated my career so far to learning ancient languages and trying to say something new about them, of course, I couldn't help but admire someone who had acquired ten languages by his early twenties, deciphered Hittite before he turned forty, dedicated his life to academic scholarship, and even had the chance to stand up for his students against fascism. So, I couldn't possibly say anything other than that I do admire Hrozný. It's really quite incredible what his contribution has been to this field.”
