An overview of all documents (originals) that were written until late in the sixteenth century BC shows that besides occasional experimenting Akkadian was the predominant language of writing. The shift to writing in the vernacular, that is, Hittite, came slowly and received a decisive push in the second half of the sixteenth century. The Hittite king Telipinu (ca. 1525 BC), the probable driving force behind the collection of the Hittite Laws, may have been instrumental in this development. From now on Hittite was the language of all written communication. Akkadian was only for diplomatic purposes and sometimes for prestige on seals and in titulature.

An overview of all possible terms denoting wooden tablets indicates that few can be regarded as positive evidence. As a result, it is argued that wooden tablets played a secondary and even modest role in scribal communication. There is also no real evidence for the theory that they were inscribed in hieroglyphs instead of cuneiform. The strong Luwian character of the terms discussed reinforces the picture of a Luwian speaking population in the chancellery. Other issues discussed here are the objects often identified as styli and assumed to be used for writing hieroglyphs, the cursivization of the hieroglyphic script, and Hittite terms for writing.

This chapter describes the various kinds of scribes, their societal status and organization, as distinguished by different terms in the Hittite texts: regular scribes, so-called wood-scribes, chief scribes, apprentices, elite scribes, and scholars. The latter would sometimes show off their learned status by deliberately using archaic sign shapes and rare expressions. To them are also ascribed the tablet catalogs or tablet inventories. These scholar-scribes seem to have engaged with the texts by memorizing them.

How the Hittite kingdom broke up still eludes us. Current archaeological thinking envisions a deliberate abandonment of the capital Hattusa by its elite. Evidence of migrations pushing eastwards from the west, recent interpretations of the Sea People’s movements in a similar direction, and the emergence of three Great Kings in Hittite fashion after 1200 in inscriptions from the eastern Konya plain (Kızıldağ, Karadağ), at KarahÖyÜk near Elbistan, and several inscriptions from the Malatya area further east may hint at where they went. Did they try to settle down and continue at Tarhuntassa, Karkamish, or elsewhere in that region? Using the fall of Ugarit around 1190 or, as some claim, the end of Emar in the late 1180s as termini post quos for the end of the kingdom one might argue for an awareness of a still existing Hittite kingdom into the early twelfth century bc but we do not know whether that was at Hattusa or already elsewhere.

Many biographies like to start at the end of their subject’s life. The final moments or days of their hero are presented as the climax of his or her life as if somehow summing it all up. Yet the reader does not know it yet. Her curiosity is piqued and, so the author hopes, she will be eager to read on. The author then turns around and starts at the very beginning, with the hero as a baby and child, with all the excitement still far away but with all the foreboding of the end just told. The hero of this book is literacy, writing and reading, in the Hittite kingdom in ancient Anatolia, or modern-day Turkey, from roughly 1650 to 1200 bc, give or take several years or perhaps even a decade or two. In this case, too, we could begin at the end, but the demise of the kingdom is still shrouded in mystery. Our hero just disappears unseen, it seems. Sometime around 1200 bc, the Hittite state literally vanished into thin air. We think the ruling elite abandoned its central Anatolian capital Hattusa and moved away somewhere south or southeast, but where to exactly? No obvious new capital has been identified as yet. And when did this all take place? Isolated outside references to a Hittite state might extend its life to 1190 or even into the 1180s bc, but nothing compels us to assume that it was still centered at Hattusa. As we will see, the number of written records dating to the very end of the kingdom suggests an earlier rather than later abandonment.

The hieroglyphic sign known as L.326 and supposedly picturing a tablet has been interpreted as the title “scribe” since 1956. Given the fact that it is the most frequently attested title on seals from the Hittite kingdom this would mean that literacy was widespread among the ruling elite of the Hittite state. It is argued in an excursus that both the iconographic rendering and the interpretation as “scribe” are flawed. Instead, it is proposed to portray a seat, indicating a high status for the person carrying the symbol on his seal. First, all Late Bronze Age evidence is passed in review, then the Iron Age evidence. As a consequence, some well-known Iron Age passages need to be re-interpreted.

After a period of political weakness during most of the fifteenth century BC, a re-invigorated kingdom, the New Kingdom, rises under Tuthaliya I around 1425 BC. With this, Hittite literature proliferates. Some genres, typical of the Old Kingdom (charters, palace chronicles), disappear or develop into different kinds of texts, others (e.g., imported and scholarly texts) come into being. This chapter gives an overview of the Hittite written legacy, mostly from the capital Boğazköy/Hattusa but also found elsewhere within the kingdom.

Although Assyrian merchants lived in Central Anatolia for over two centuries and used writing extensively for their business local Anatolians only became interested in the use of script toward the end of the Old Assyrian Period. This coincided with the emergence of the first unified Anatolian kingdom under Anitta. It is argued that the so-called Anitta Text, known only from later copies in Hittite, could only have been written in Assyrian in Old Assyrian cuneiform.

This chapter gives an overview of all sources written in Anatolian hieroglyphs, that is, seals and inscriptions. Whereas cuneiform was the strictly internal means of communication within the kingdom, the hieroglyphs were used whenever the population at large was addressed. Given the sociolinguistic situation hieroglyphic inscriptions were written in Luwian, not in Hittite.

The thousands of bullae and other objects impressed with seals found in the Hittite capital Hattusa have thus far been interpreted, almost exclusively, as related to wooden tablets. The seal impressions contain the names and very often also the titles of kings and high-ranking officials allegedly witnessing royal decisions recorded on the wooden tablets that were lost in fires that destroyed the buildings where they were kept. Such buildings would have housed the state archives of the Hittite kingdom. This theory leaves a lot of essential questions unanswered. Instead, using Neo-Assyrian and later parallels, it is proposed that these collections of sealings were used as reference collections to check the authenticity of a seal and to detect forgeries. Seal forgeries were common in the ancient Near East and checking earlier impressions from the same persons was the only way to verify the authenticity of incoming sealed documents and goods.