Hittite inscriptions


The corpus of texts written in the Hittite language consists of more than 30,000 tablets or fragments that have been excavated from the royal archives of the capital of the Hittite Kingdom, Hattusa, close to the modern Turkish town of Boğazkale or Boğazköy. While Hattusa has yielded the majority of tablets, other sites where they have been found include: Maşat Höyük, Ortaköy, Kuşaklı or Kayalıpınar in Turkey, Alalakh, Ugarit and Emar in Syria, Amarna in Egypt.
The tablets are mostly conserved in the Turkish museums of Ankara, Istanbul, Boğazkale and Çorum as well as in international museums such as the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin, the British Museum in London and the Musée du Louvre in Paris.
The corpus is indexed by the Catalogue des Textes Hittites. The catalogue is only a classification of texts; it does not give the texts. One traditionally cites texts by their numbers in CTH. Major sources for studies of selected texts themselves are the books of the StBoT series and the online Textzeugnisse der Hethiter.

CTH numbering scheme

The texts are classified as follows:
  • Historical Texts
  • Administrative Texts
  • Legal Texts
  • Lexical Texts
  • Literary Texts
  • Mythological Texts
  • Hymns and Prayers
  • Ritual Texts
  • Cult Inventory Texts
  • Omen and Oracle Texts
  • Vows
  • Festival Texts
  • Texts in Other Languages
  • Texts of Unknown Type

    Selected texts

Some Wikipedia articles dedicated to specific Hittite texts follow. More are to be found as sections of other articles.

Old Kingdom