Hattusa (Boğazkale)

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The capital of the Hittite state, on the central Anatolian plateau in Çorum province, Türkiye, and the source of the tablet archives that made Hittite readable. German excavations under Hugo Winckler from 1906 recovered thousands of cuneiform tablets from the citadel and temple archives — treaties, laws, rituals, letters and annals — written in several languages, of which the principal one was unidentified. That archive is what Bedřich Hrozný worked from when he announced in 1915 that the language was Indo-European. The site matters to this Journey as a specific instance of a general point: the comparative method is limited by the corpus available to it, and a single excavation can transform the reconstruction of an entire family. Without Boğazköy there is no attested Anatolian branch, no confirmation of the laryngeals, and no reason to redraw the top of the Indo-European tree. The site is inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.