Kaskean: A New Recorded Language in the Archives of Ḫattuša?

Abstract The present paper aims at presenting an already published Hittite cuneiform tablet originating in the Great Temple of the Lower City at Ḫattuša, which preserves over 60 fragmentary lines of an unidentified language. Combining both a philological and a linguistic approach to the material, it will be argued that this additional recorded language in the archives of Ḫattuša is a Kaskean language. Even though the meanings of its lexemes are so far unknown, using a morphological approach it is possible to identify prefixes, suffixes and lexical bases and thereby to reveal the agglutinative nature of the language. Further, this data will be compared with the results that Einar von Schuler obtained in his linguistic chapter on the Kaskean language in 1965, which was based solely on toponyms and onomastics found in Hittite texts, and his results will be reassessed in face of actual common nouns in the language proper.