Bogazköy

BOGHAZKÖY. - This is the Turkish name of a small village east of Ankara in Turkey, very well known among scholars of the civilizations of the ancient East, because not far from it lie the ruins of the capital of the Hittite empire, Hattisalá, among which considerable remains of the state archive and library of this nation have been found at various times, including very recently. The writings brought to light are inscribed on clay tablets in cuneiform characters, the overwhelming majority in the Hittite language, but not a few written in other languages of the empire: Hattic, Luwian, Palaic, Hurrian, Sumerian, and also the Akkadian language, that is, Babylonian and Assyrian. These are the tablets of B., which have shed so much light on the civilization of Asia Minor from about 1800 to 1200 B.C. Among the tablets, almost every literary genre is represented: from international treaties to prayers, the Annals of the Hittite kings, vocabularies, and Hittite and Hurrian versions of the Mesopotamian epic poem of the hero Gilgameš. Most of the tablets have been published in facsimile, though not all have been translated and interpreted (v. dei). Giuseppe Furlani