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Hello, Word Lovers!
The oldest peace treaty we know of has a clause about refugees. Egypt and the Hittite empire signed it in the thirteenth century B.C.E. It survives only in copies: pressed into clay in Anatolia, carved on a temple wall in Egypt.
A further fragment of the clay version has now been identified. It carries the treaty's rules for people who fled one kingdom for the other, and for the homes they left behind. Turkey announced the find in late September.
š Weekly Word Wonder: CUNEIFORM
Pronunciation: kyoo-NEE-uh-form
Part of speech: Noun (also an adjective)
Definition: An ancient system of writing that pressed wedge-shaped marks into damp clay, used across the Middle East for more than three thousand years; also the marks themselves.
Origin: Cuneiform arrived in English in the 1670s from the French cuneiforme, built on Latin cuneus, "a wedge", and -formis, "shaped". The word means, plainly, wedge-shaped. The same cuneus lies behind coin: coins were struck from a wedge-shaped die, and the name of the die became the name of the money. English did not apply the word to the script itself until the early nineteenth century, once travellers had recognised the marks as wedges.
Usage:
The museum displays a small clay tablet with cuneiform writing
Ancient scribes used cuneiform to record laws, stories, and trade accounts.
š What's Special?
The fragment was found at Buyukkale, the royal palace mound at Hattusa, the Hittite capital in what is now Corum province, Turkey. After about a year of study, scholars matched its text to sections 12 to 20 of the treaty. Those passages deal with people who crossed from one kingdom to the other during the war. Both sides agreed to send them home, and to protect the houses they had left. Turkey's culture minister announced the identification on 21 September, the International Day of Peace. The treaty is usually dated to the middle of the thirteenth century B.C.E. It came about sixteen years after the Battle of Kadesh, the chariot battle that neither side won.
More about the treaty...
The treaty does not survive in a single document. The Hittite copies are in Akkadian cuneiform, the diplomatic language of the day. The Egyptian version was carved in hieroglyphs on a temple wall at Thebes. The original is described as having been written on silver tablets, which are lost. A copper replica of the clay tablet hangs at the United Nations in New York.
š§© Community Puzzle
Jumbled Letters: Unscramble these words.
ERBORD (The line where one country's land ends and another's begins.) ā
FEUREG (Shelter from danger, or the protection a country gives a person who has fled it.) ā
CRIEBS (A person whose work was writing, in the days before printing.) ā
PURAPSY (The writing material the ancient Egyptians made from reeds of the Nile.) ā
SYEABMS (The office one country keeps inside another country's capital.) ā
Last Week's Answers (Edition #45)
Jumbled Letters
LAASI ā ALIAS
RMKONIE ā MONIKER
SNIOREMM ā MISNOMER
YMDUPENOS ā PSEUDONYM
TTEIL ā TITLE
Until next week, keep playing.
ā The Lexulous Team
