Anatolians on the Move: From Kurgans to Kanesh by Petra Goedegebuure

Oriental Institute Podcast

The Marija Gimbutas Memorial Lecture Anatolians on the Move: From Kurgans to Kanesh Petra Goedegebuure Associate Professor of Hittitology Last year Sir Colin Renfrew opened the Marija Gimbutas lecture series acknowledging that she was essentially right when she said that the Proto-Indo-Europeans came from north of the Black Sea and then dispersed east and west. And you may recall that Colin Renfrew originally said that Indo-Europeans came out of Anatolia. So what he did was, acknowledging that she was correct, and he used very recent ancient DNA research that really show that Proto-Indo-Europeans are from the north of the Black Sea, but he left open what happened in Anatolia. So what I want to talk about is the Hittites who are from Anatolia. They are kind of an outlier. We do not know how and when they arrived from north of the Black Sea. And this is what I want to explore. So I want to look at what do the Hittites say themselves about their origins, what legends do they have, what do models—linguistic models of language contact—tell us about what happened in prehistory in Anatolia. And finally I want to incorporate some very very recent ancient DNA research basically published in 2020, so this month, and see if that can bring this a little bit closer to understand how the Hittites arrived in Kanesh. This audio recording was originally presented as an illustrated lecture on Feruary 5, 2020. The video of this lecture is available on the OI YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/Pe4jnBdVxjw Our lectures are free and available to the public thanks to the generous support of our members. To become a member, please visit: bit.ly/2AWGgF7