I was just listening to a podcast about the various theories on how Tutankhamen died, and the fighting between the Egyptians and the Hittites in that time period, which apparently ended (for the time being) with the “Silver Treaty”. The podcaster talked about how this treaty was written on silver tablets and then copied onto baser materials, but he never mentions the language.
At this time in the ancient world, were such treaties often written in the language of one side or the other, both languages, or some other lingua franca? Looking at pictures, the copies of the silver treaty appear to be written in hieroglyphics and cuneiform, so I’m assuming it’s both languages, but just how common would it have been for an Egyptian to know Hittite and vice-versa?
Great question. The two fragmentary copies of the treaty found in Egypt (Temple of Karnak and the Ramesseum) are written in hieroglyphics. Both were found in the early- to mid-19th century by the French. At the time, it was not clear exactly whom the treaty addressed. In the early 20th century, the Germans under (more or less) the infamous Hugo Winckler excavated at the site of Hattusa, in Turkey, the old Hittite capital. I'm sure you already heard that there they found the "Royal Archives" and thousands upon thousands of clay tablets, written in cuneiform but (mostly) representing Hittite speech. It is one of the most important archaeological discoveries of our time, and especially for near-eastern studies. It also led to or aided a massive amount of progress in the field of historical linguistics. It forms the backbone of our main corpus of Hittite language texts today.
Cuneiform, adapted from Mesopotamia, was a writing system rather than a language. It could be used to represent completely different languages. This is the case at the Royal Archives. Supposedly, Winckler immediately recognized that the tablet(s) in question were not representing Hittite language like the others, but Akkadian, which was in fact the lingua franca of the times. It is confusingly and erroneously sometimes called "Babylonian" in older texts, and often "Middle Babylonian" today ("Old Babylonian" now properly belongs to an earlier period, ending about 1500 BCE, unless I'm mistaken). The common language used by our Egyptians and Hittites here was properly "Middle Assyrian," one of the last vestiges of Akkadian. In the coming centuries it will be increasingly replaced by Aramaic.
Anyway, Winkler supposedly instantly connected this Akkadian tablet, written in cuneiform, with the Egyptian treat fragments, well-known for half a century before his excavation at Hattusa. The rest is history! Note also that Hittite is an Indo-European language, not Afro-Asiatic, and it just borrowed cuneiform for its writing purposes.
If you liked the podcast and want to dig a little deeper into this time period in Egypt, let me recommend Spalinger, War in ancient Egypt : the New Kingdom (Blackwell 2005). Lots of good stuff but not too difficult to read for the non-specialist!