Hayasa, or the Argument About a Name

In the second millennium BC the Hittites arrived in Anatolia. On the prevailing theory this was the first great migration of Indo-Europeans out of the homeland—the steppes north of the Black Sea and along the lower Volga—across the Balkans and into the Near East. At its height, in the fourteenth century BC, the Hittite kingdom controlled nearly all of Anatolia, the northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia.

The language that ate bread and drank water

The Hittites spoke the oldest attested Indo-European language, and wrote it in Old Babylonian cuneiform, borrowed after their conquest of northern Syria.

It was deciphered in 1915 by the Czech scholar Bedřich Hrozný, and the moment of decipherment is one of the best stories in the discipline. He was staring at a line that read, in transliteration, nu NINDA-an ezzateni, watar-ma ekuteni. The Sumerian sign NINDA was known to mean “bread.” And then he looked at watar—and at ezza-—and realised he was reading, in a fourteen-hundred-year-old clay tablet from central Anatolia, now you will eat bread and drink water.

An English speaker can very nearly do it unaided. Watar is water; ezza- is eat.

There was a further consequence. Hittite turned out to preserve consonants that Ferdinand de Saussure had predicted in 1879 on purely theoretical grounds, before anybody had seen them—sounds he had deduced must once have existed in Proto-Indo-European from the shape of the vowels they left behind. In 1927 they were duly found in the Hittite tablets. It remains one of the most satisfying things ever done in linguistics: a prediction confirmed nearly fifty years later by a language nobody knew existed when the prediction was made.

A kingdom in somebody else’s files

At the beginning of the twentieth century the German archaeologist Hugo Winckler excavated the Hittite capital of Hattusa at Boğazköy—now Boğazkale, in Çorum province—and found there an enormous archive of cuneiform tablets.

Among them were mentions of a little-known state called Hayasa, which lay on the north-eastern edge of the Hittite world, in the mountain districts of what are now Erzincan and Erzurum—the same country as the Kura-Araxes culture.

The sources are sparse. Sometimes the Hittites attack the Hayasans; sometimes the Hayasans attack the Hittites. We have the names of a few chieftains and of some disputed territories, and very little else. Hayasa exists, so far as the written record goes, only in the correspondence of its enemies.

The name

Here is where it becomes contentious, and the point needs a piece of information most English readers will not have.

Armenians do not call themselves Armenians. Their own word for themselves is hay, and their name for their country is Hayastan. Armenia is what everybody else calls them, from the Old Persian.

So when a kingdom called Hayasa turns up in Bronze Age tablets, in more or less the right part of the world, the resemblance is hard not to notice—and some scholars have proposed that Armenian ethnogenesis begins here.

The hypothesis is disputed, and has consequently become the subject of debates conducted in a nearly religious register: some hold it proven, others untenable, and there is not enough objective evidence to settle it either way. Which is roughly where a careful person should leave it.

What did survive

What the period did leave are tangible things. Small bronze figurines of animals; vessels in the shape of birds, of beasts, even of shoes, with simple but expressive ornament.

Their makers may have spoken proto-Armenian. They may equally have spoken something else entirely, which has left no trace at all. We shall not now find out.

But one thing is beyond dispute: they made beautiful objects. And the beauty has outlasted the argument by three and a half thousand years, so that we can go and look at it today.