Preface

When I learned Latin and Greek at high school in Amsterdam, we used books called Tirocinium Latinum and Graecum. Tirocinium means “the first military service, the first campaign of a young soldier.” The books spread the grammar of the two languages over a number of lessons, each lesson introducing different parts of the language and ending with an exercise. Initially, the individual sentences were very short and elementary, but Lesson 1 already ended with a little story (Marcus dolorem habet) that we had to translate and then recite from memory. Learning Hittite and other ancient languages at university, however, was a quite different experience. All pedagogy seemed suddenly thrown overboard: The professor ran through the grammar and we were plunged right into the first real text. Years later, teaching Latin and Greek at my old high school myself, new pedagogical ideals had meanwhile outlawed the use of sentences out of context, and lessons consisted from the very beginning of made-up stories only.

When I started teaching Hittite at the University of Amsterdam in 1990, I wanted to try something different. Writing up stories about a fictional Hittite Marcus was and still is out of the question: We do not yet understand all the intricacies of the Hittite language and cannot claim that we can write flawless classical Muršili-prose. But the Tirocinium model with individual sentences might work as long as the sentences come from real texts. My other model here has been the Lehrbuch des Akkadischen (Leipzig 1984) of Kaspar K. Riemschneider, who did just that. However, he did not include the cuneiform script in his book. Cuneiform is not just aesthetically pleasing and fun, but is also an integral and essential part of the language as we learn it. Learning ancient Near Eastern languages without it is like learning to fly in a simulator but never really getting off the ground.