Overview and Worldwide Context

Western and Central Asia are a part of the world especially significant to our understanding of deep linguistic prehistory – not only its own, but also that of the continents that surround it. Nowhere more closely than here, moreover, might archaeology and linguistics go hand in hand, for Western Asia is also the repository of many of the oldest written records in any languages, inscribed in what are among the earliest of all writing systems. So here historical linguistics is by no means limited to its abstract reconstructions of individual words in isolation, but enjoys detailed, continuous texts – unearthed, moreover, in rich archaeological contexts. The linguistic data they harbour attest directly to how, in language just as on other levels, the western and central regions of Asia long played the role of a nexus for the continents that surround them.

Still today, Western Asia is home to representatives of two of the broadest and oldest of all language families, and those whose past we best understand, thanks in large part to how far back we can trace them here. The great geographical spread of Indo-European, from Iceland to the Bay of Bengal, is centred here, as too are its earliest known texts that first bring the family into recorded history. Most notable is the language of a veritable library of tablets in cuneiform script, discovered in the early 20th century at the former Hittite capital in Central Anatolia, and whose subsequent decipherment brought far-reaching revisions to our understanding of the Indo-European family as a whole, and its deep prehistory. This has since been complemented by the progressive realisation that all of the earliest attested languages within Asia Minor westwards of Hittite are its sisters, within a broader “Anatolian” branch of Indo-European.