184 Hittite Tablets Just Surfaced — They Carry a Plague, a Dead Infant Princess, and Generals Begging for Backup
The 184 cuneiform tablets and fragments recovered at Kayalıpınar in Turkey's Sivas province — identified with the ancient Hittite city of Šamuḫa — constitute what Turkey's Ministry of Culture and Tourism has called the most comprehensive Hittite-language archive discovered in the twenty-first century. Dating to the mid-fourteenth century BCE under the reign of Tudhaliya II, these documents record a high-fever epidemic sweeping from city to city, divination rituals performed to determine the fate of ailing princes and a nursing infant princess, and urgent military dispatches from generals encircled in western Anatolia. Two tablets together trace an infant princess's arc from sickness to death to funeral rites — one of the rare moments in antiquity where a royal family's private tragedy was formally entered into the state record. Military correspondence from western Anatolian commanders warns that their forces face annihilation without reinforcements; some English-language reports have gone further, attributing additional statements to these letters that the original Turkish-language sources describe only with provisional, interpretive language. Written in both Hittite and Hurrian, the archive was produced at Šamuḫa during one of the most acute crises in Hittite history, when the empire faced simultaneous invasions from multiple directions and the royal court had relocated from the capital Hattusha. The excavation, led by Koç University's Associate Professor Çiğdem Maner since 2021, recovered 53 pieces in the 2025 season and 131 more from the same archival context in 2026, suggesting a coherent royal archive whose full extent remains to be excavated.