Ideological and Linguistic reform among the Hittites in the Second Half of the 13th Century B.C.

Abstract

The Hittite cuneiform texts from the second half of the 13th century contain some words that are marked with special characters called gloss-wedges. Based on the observation that many of these words have meanings that had been prohibited since the period of the Proto-Indo-European language onwards, while others were closely related to the Hittite ideology of that period, it may be safely assumed that the sudden introduction of gloss-wedges in Hittite texts was but a part of a wider ideological reform that also affected the language. The fact that many words marked with gloss-wedges refer to unacceptable behavior, which in the context of the marked words was often explicitly prohibited, strongly supports this assumption.