A New Discovery Offers a Glimpse into the World of the Hittites—in Their Own Words
A new cache of cuneiform tablets reveals the everyday lives of people in the Hittite Empire—from religious rituals to a princess who died in a plague.
Archaeologists working at the site of Kayalıpınar in central Turkey have announced the discovery of 131 cuneiform tablets written in Hittite and Hurrian and dating to the reign of the Hittite King Tudhaliya II circa 1400 BC. The new tablets advance our knowledge of the Hittite civilization beyond the confines of its well-excavated capital city, giving researchers better access to the lives of people who lived, fought, worshipped, and died in other areas of the vast empire—from priests who divined the future to an infant princess who fell ill from a previously unknown epidemic.
Together with earlier findings, the discovery also allows us to learn about the lives of the Hittites in their own words, rather than relying on narratives in the Hebrew Bible or inscriptions left behind by Egyptian pharaohs. By deciphering these clay cuneiform tablets, archaeologists are finally revealing an important but fragmented history of an empire that emerged in modern-day Turkey and Syria during the Late Bronze Age, grew to rival the power of New Kingdom Egypt, and then seemingly vanished. The Hittites used an Indo-European language, and scribes adapted that language to a system of writing called cuneiform that uses signs for syllables and vowels.
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However, most of the Hittite tablets that survive are not representative of the entire population: Around 30,000 tablets and fragments come from the royal capital of the Hittite Empire, Hattusa (modern-day Boğazkale), an archive that transmits largely elite and royal perspectives from the royal citadel. This means that the daily lives and rituals of those living within hundreds of other Hittite cities are less well known—until these excavations at Kayalıpınar.
In antiquity, Kayalıpınar was the site of the ancient Hittite city of Šamuḫa, a religious and commercial center that became an important military capital during Tudhaliya’s reign. When the cache of newly unearthed tablets is added to the 53 tablets discovered at the same site in 2025, 184 new documents tell us about the people within the city.
“There are very few archives that we have found outside the capital city. The ones from Šamuḫa are some of the first,” says archaeologist and Bronze Age expert Eric Cline, who was not involved in the excavation. “They further confirm it was an important Hittite city.”
The new tablets reveal Hittite religion, bureaucratic procedures, and administrative life connected to the state. They also point to mass upheaval. During the imperial period when the tablets were written, the mountainous Kaska tribes were attacking Hittite cities, including the capital. This made Šamuḫa an even more important military center for resisting the encroaching raiders during Tudhaliya’s reign. Under the reign of Suppiluliuma I just decades later, the Hittites would grow their army, territory, and geopolitical power to its highest heights.
(3,200-Year-Old Trees Reveal the Collapse of an Ancient Empire.)
The tablets further reveal how endemic disease was in the Bronze Age, with details of a plague that was previously unknown to historians. In a translated statement, Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, the Minister of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Turkey, noted that some of the new tablets remark on a high-fever epidemic spreading from city to city. “The newly reported epidemic seems like a new plague,” says Theo van den Hout, professor emeritus of Hittite and Anatolian Languages at the University of Chicago and editor emeritus of the Chicago Hittite Dictionary Project. “It’s certainly not the later one known from Muršiliš II’s roughly 1321 to 1295 B.C.E. reign, which was allegedly ‘imported’ by Egyptian prisoners of war.”
The newly described plague took a toll on Hittite children and infants in particular. Some of the tablets even describe an ailing baby princess, her subsequent death from the epidemic, and the rituals performed for her funeral. Combined with earlier discoveries, the finds bolster our understanding of how the Hittites used religion to combat disease. As van den Hout points out, several later cuneiform tablets from Hattusa reveal rituals like the Plague Prayers of Muršilis II, which chronicles the king visiting an oracle and taking steps to appease the Hattian Storm-god so that the plague killing his people could finally be lifted.
The tablets also hint at other aspects of Hittite religion that were common in the Near East, such as augury, or the study of birds, bird calls, and their flight paths. This an important part of interpreting the will of the gods in many Mediterranean religions, and Nuri Ersoy revealed in his statement that some of the new inscriptions record the observations and routes followed by Hittite bird diviners and “offer previously unknown insights into the Hittites' practices of divination." Taken together with a tablet found at the site in 2023, which also noted the interpretation of certain bird travel paths, the new tablets provide a deeper understanding of a practice that ancient religion expert Ian Rutherford has called “largely opaque.”
The new archive of tablets excavated at Šamuḫa come at an exciting and transformative time within the field of Hittite studies. Archaeologists excavating at Hattusa recently unearthed a fragment of the Treaty of Kadesh, the world's oldest peace treaty, which dates to 1269 BCE. And top researchers at the Julius-Maximilians University of Würzburg and the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz are now using artificial intelligence to help distinguish the possible identities of Hittite scribes and date various fragments. With these discoveries a lost empire is slowly coming back to life—along with the augurs, princesses, soldiers, scribes, and children who lived and died within it.
