The 1996 film "The English Patient" was a critical and commercial success, winning nine Academy Awards including those for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Dramatic Score. It is still widely and deservedly regarded as a masterpiece. However, as is nearly always the case, the film is inferior to the brilliant novel upon which it is based, the book of the same name by the Sri Lankan Canadian author Michael Ondaatje. The film, for instance, does not do justice to the character of Kip, presenting him as fairly two-dimensional, whereas the book reveals a far deeper character.

One of the ironies of both book and film is of course that the titular "English Patient" is not English at all, but rather a Hungarian nobleman Laszlo Almasy. What is perhaps less well known is that this character is based upon a real figure of this name. Whilst there is no evidence that the real Almasy gallivanted around Cairo and in the Egyptian desert with a married Englishwoman, the character is true to its origins in being an explorer who discovered prehistoric rock art at Jebel Uweinat.

The true, and indeed fictionalized, story of Almasy reveals that in the period between the wars, the search for the ancient past was not the preserve of Western Europeans and Americans. The subject of this latest piece in the Famous Travelers to Türkiye series is himself a Central European. He is the Czech scholar and archaeologist Bedrich Hrozny (1879-1952).

Brief sketch of Hrozny

This piece will focus on the two highlights of Hrozny’s career and both of which connect to Türkiye. The first is a metaphorical rather than a physical trip, though it did begin with a visit to Istanbul. It is his successful exploration into the language of the Hittites, one of the greatest of the historical Anatolian peoples. The second involved a trip to Central Anatolia in order to carry out an archaeological exploration.

As for Hrozny himself, he was born in 1879 in Lysa nad Laben in what was then the Bohemian Kingdom in the Austro-Hungarian Empire but is now part of the Czech Republic. He was attracted to ancient history and took part in an excavation in Palestine in 1904. He served as a professor at the University of Vienna and following World War I, at Charles University in Prague.

Hrozny was a skilled linguist and during the dig in Palestine, as Christian Falvey, notes for "recipes for brewing Sumerian beer" Hrozny not only discovered them but translated and published them too. This foreshadows his career in Anatolia as a discoverer of ancient texts and decipherer of them, although in terms of his career in Anatolia, these two would be reversed as will be seen. First, however, some context as to the archaeological situation in Anatolia is required.

Pre-Hrozny archaeology in Anatolia

Toward the end of the 19th century, antique dealers began dealing in cuneiform tablets from central Anatolia that scholars could read as they were written in the known Akkadian language. The origin of these tablets came to be identified as the mound of Karahöyük near the village of Kültepe, which itself is some 20 kilometers (12.43 miles) to the northeast of Kayseri.

Other tablets were also on the market, and the origin of these was traced to Boğazköy, far to the northwest of Kültepe, but these were indecipherable, for though they were written in the Babylonian cuneiform script, they were in an unknown language.

Excavations in 1906 by the German Hugo Winckler at Boğazköy, following up on those made by the French Ernest Chantre in 1892-3, soon revealed a huge store of over 10,000 tablets, most of which were written in this same strange language, but mixed among them were also in Akkadian. From the latter, it was realized that this city was the capital of the "Land of Hatti," or the Hittites. What the archaeologist Seton Lloyd calls "a great imperial people" had been discovered.

Excavations at Kültepe were a different matter, though. Chantre had gone from Boğazköy to carry out a dig on the mound in 1893-4, but it failed in its aim. Winckler also moved from Boğazköy to Kültepe in a brief attempt to find the tablets at this site, but to no avail, and as Lloyd notes "it had begun to be doubted whether the site itself had been correctly identified."

These digs inspired the work of Hrozny, though in different ways. In the first case, the documents brought back from Central Anatolia inspired Hrozny to try his hand at deciphering the language. In the second, it spurred Hrozny to come to Türkiye and attempt to locate the origin of the other tablets himself.

Decipherment of Hittite language

Just before the outbreak of World War I, Hrozny made a trip to Istanbul to make copies of the Hittite tablets. Back home, he was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army but was enlisted as a clerk rather than as an active soldier, so he was able to devote time during his wartime service to attempting to crack this mysterious language. He commenced with the idea that it was a Semitic one, of the same language family as Akkadian until he came across two rhymed lines.

They were "NU NINDA-AN EZZATENI / WATAR-MA EKUTENI." He knew that "ninda" was Babylonian for "bread" and then the idea came to him that the next word "ezza" might mean eat in a similar way to the Latin "edere" or the German "essen."

With this conceptual shift, he could now see other Indo-European language similarities in the remaining words, identifying "nu" as "now" and "watar" as "water." Altogether, the sentence reads "Now you will eat bread and drink water."

He continued with this method, identifying certain words and then making what Jay Jasanoff calls "brilliant guesses" as to what other words around it would be. In this way, he, as Jasanoff notes, "plugged values into the words that proved to be correct." He had cracked open a language that had lain unknown, and indeed forgotten, for three millennia. In 1915, he published his findings. As Jasanoff notes, Hrozny had "shown that Hittite was a member of the Indo-European language family" which includes modern English and Czech as well as ancient Sanskrit and Greek.

Although much more a scholar than Heinrich Schliemann, Hronzy shared a degree of the German archaeologist’s impetuosity making him push on further and faster than the slow measured pace scholarship allows. Thus, the historian of the Hittites, O. R. Gurney, notes that Hrozny’s use of guesswork, especially as he "was not an Indo-European philologist" allowed other scholars to reject his entire work, mirroring the situation of Schliemann in his claim to have discovered Troy.

As for Hrozny, the attacks upon him led him to respond by overwhelming his critics with data and so he translated a number of the tablets, including from the Hittite legal code, and published them in 1919. It became clear that, as Gurney notes, "much of" what had been claimed by Hrozny "was in fact sound" and he has now long been celebrated as the decipherer of the Hittite language in cuneiform.

1925 excavation at Kültepe

Hrozny also wanted to work in Anatolia itself. With the architect Jaroslav Cukr, he paid another visit to Türkiye in 1924, on what Gojko Barjamovic calls an "exploratory trip." However, at that time, the Turks had only just regained peace after having been at war with foreigners almost constantly for over a decade. Thus, local suspicions of foreign interference in their country remained high. The intentions of Hrozny and Cukr being misunderstood unfortunately resulted in them being, as Barjamovic notes, "assaulted several times," especially in Kayseri. Cukr was even shot at, which put him off taking part in the excavation the following year, although Hrozny remained determined on it.

The permission for Hrozny to dig was brought about by the leaders of two new states that had emerged from World War I and its aftermath. From the side of Czechoslovakia, Hrozny gained the support of Tomas Masaryk, the first president of the country, whilst the first president of the Republic of Türkiye, Kemal Atatürk, then still Gazi Mustafa Kemal, signed Hrozny’s permit himself.

On his arrival back in Kayseri in 1925, Hrozny found the atmosphere quite different. This proves that the unfortunate incidents of the previous year did not reflect some kind of deep-set Turkish xenophobia, which could not simply have evaporated in the space of a year but had rather been a product of strained times. As the era of peace ushered in by the new Turkish republic began to be truly felt, the previously riled inhabitants regained their normal equanimity.

Nonetheless, in the excavation itself, Hrzony faced what Barjamovic has called "extremely difficult local conditions." The period of the war had impoverished the region, and "there was no access to clean drinking water, and malaria was rampant on the marshy plane." Once again parallels to Schliemann are evident. Indeed, Hrozny himself came down with the disease.

As the Kültepe villagers had been the ones finding and selling the tablets to middlemen, and as they had found this an easy way to wealth, especially in trying times, they naturally wished to conceal the source of them, which was not on Karahöyük. As Lloyd puts it for the Hrozny expedition that started out on that mound, "It is a remarkable tribute to the purposeful reticence of the Kültepe villagers that they were now for the third time in succession able to watch a party of foreigners engaged in this particular form of a wild goose chase." However, as Lloyd reveals, during this expedition, their "luck did not hold."

Hrozny was not simply proficient in ancient languages. He was also, as Lloyd notes, "a good linguist and spoke excellent Turkish." Two of the men who he had taken on for the dig were residents of Kayseri and thus had no direct interest in protecting the source of the tablets. They did, however, know of it and had found the way in which the villagers had led the foreign teams on such a merry dance highly amusing. Hrozny, with his Turkish, managed to learn the truth from them and immediately redirected his excavations to the correct nearby area. As Lloyd puts it, "During the weeks that followed his perseverance was rewarded by the recovery of more than a thousand ‘Cappadocian’ tablets and much valuable information regarding the setting in which they lay."

His excavations also demonstrated that in a certain sense, Chantre and Winckler had been right to be drawn to Karahöyük. For underneath the mound, a walled city from the beginning of the second millennium B.C. was revealed. The site of the tablets, however archaeologically important in modern times, would have been an inferior settlement in ancient ones. It was the site of a foreign trader’s colony, called Kanesh, which lay outside of the city proper. A later parallel would be the case of the walled city of Istanbul and the trading colony in Galata.

Unlike Galata though, Kanesh was destroyed in a conflagration, from which the fleeing inhabitants seem to have left behind most of their possessions. As the ancient historian Gwendolyn Leick notes, such fires are "a dreadful fate for the inhabitants but a good thing for archaeologists" as it means "many artifacts" remain "in situ" and the clay tablets get "baked hard" and thus survive "for millennia."

Thus, at Kanesh, there was a great deal for the archaeologist to discover, including what Lloyd calls "much pottery and a variety of domestic objects." Yet, it was the tablets left by the record-keeping Mesopotamian traders that Hrozny was particularly focused on and from them, he, as Lloyd notes, was able to collate "the names of individual merchants and the complete records of their businesses over a long period."

Lloyd also notes that since "the tablets were exactly dated by the names of contemporary Assyrian kings," this enabled the objects discovered along with them to be accurately dated, and this in turn allowed such objects at other archaeological sites that lacked written records to be dated correctly, thus transforming the knowledge of ancient Anatolia.

Later life

His discoveries did not sate Hrozny’s interest in this historical era. Indeed, in 1929, he penned an entry on the Hittites in the 14th edition of the prestigious Encyclopaedia Britannica. This has been heralded by Gurney as "the first attempt to synthesize the knowledge of Hittite life and culture that had been gained from the texts."

He hoped to reproduce his success with his Hittite decipherment by also deciphering Hittite hieroglyphs, Linear B from ancient Crete, and an Indian writing system. However, as Falvey notes, he "found his good fortune fading" and he failed at his attempts. Less commendably, he also "doggedly resisted the ultimately correct decipherments of his colleagues once they had beaten him to the punch."

Hrozny lived through tumultuous times back in his native country. Indeed, he saw the temporary end of it as it came under Nazi German and Hungarian occupation in 1939. At that time, Hrozny had recently been made rector of the prestigious Charles University in Prague, and he bravely refused to let Nazi soldiers on to its campus. As Barjamovic notes, Hrozny then could have fled his homeland, but chose to stay in his post and "bring it through some of its most difficult years." In 1944, he suffered a heart attack, which as Barjamovic notes, "effectively put an end to his career as an active researcher." He died in Prague in 1952.

AI, future of deciphering ancient texts

The increasing expansion of artificial intelligence, into new areas is a hot topic, as the current strike in Hollywood demonstrates. Recent news has also shown that AI is also being used on Mesopotamian tablets and will surely be tried out on all previously indecipherable written texts from the past.

That this will be a great aid to ancient historians is indisputable. Yet, to me, there is something sad about this development. It is that AI is almost certain to consign to the past those pinnacles of human intellectual achievement in which a single individual through sheer mental effort has puzzled over and eventually cracked a language, rescuing it from the dustbin of history.

These include figures such as Jean-François Champollion who deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs through Hrozny to Michael Ventris who, where Hrozny failed, cracked the Linear B and proved that it was an early Greek script. Now, however, it is figures such as these who will themselves become solely historic, and this surely entails a loss as to what it is to be human that is similar in cause and impact to when the supercomputer Deep Blue defeated Gary Kasparov back in 1997 and changed chess forever.