Anatolian peoples

Thousands of clay tablets preserve Hittite texts dating back to the second millennium BC.

Anatolians also generally regarded as the earliest major branch to have separated from the rest of the Indo-European family, although precisely how that split should be represented remains a matter of debate for scholars.

And this gives us a very interesting perspective on language change.

Some features that seem to be absent from the other Indo-European branches may not have been absent from the ancestral language at all.

Gene shift within the Romans occurred drastically after their expansion of the East.

Researchers note heavy inflows of Anatolian genes from internal migration.

Rome went from 22% blue-eyed, clustering with North Italians, to only 4% clustering with Anatolians.

So that seems quite important.

All right, sorry, let me just get to your questions and comments.

And people began to go their, you know, uh, uh, according to how you could understand, you know, your language, you would just, you would, you would have to go with the people that, that could understand you.

And I think that we see evidence of language at Göbekli Tepe, and this is another hypothesis I'm putting forth, is that there's, I think there's evidence of Anatolian hieroglyphics at Göbekli Tepe.

And if that's true, Göbekli Tepe, um, is perhaps not Neolithic at all.

It's, um...

It would culturally re-date it.

Anatolian hieroglyphics, um, are, uh, are based in, uh, a language called, called the Luwians, who were contemporaneous with the Hittites.

Luwians, um, uh, had a language that they used.

Uh, they had two, um, formal languages, uh, that they used.

One of the great crises of the Hittite world happened in the 15th century BC.

The general Supi Luliuma simultaneously battled rebels known as the Kaskians from the Caucasus Mountains in the east, at the same time as a coalition of Western Anatolian peoples known as the Arzawans or Asua.

This Western revolt included the participation of the city of Wilusa in far northwestern Anatolia and may have involved some mercenaries from Mycenaean Greece.

Supiluliuma used his glory to launch himself to kingship, but the problem of these western territories did not go away, as we know from later correspondences.

In excuse me, we have the Hittites in Anatolia, another Indo-European speaking people.

They speak an Anatolian language.

They have an empire centered on the city of Hattusha, which is kind of an east central Turkey.

And they have an empire that covers most of what's now like Asian Turkey, a little bit of Syria.

So Troy, real place, it's an archaeological site called Hisselrick in- It's Volusia, right?

What's that? Is it Volusia that-

Yeah, Vilusa was probably the indigenous name for it in an Anatolian Indo-European language, which is where we get Ilium, hence Iliad.

Yeah, so if memory serves, there's a fairly substantial period without occupation on that site, which is insane because it had been continuously occupied since I think around 3000 BC.