Anatolian peoples

The Anatolians were Indo-European-speaking peoples of the Anatolian Peninsula in present-day Turkey, identified by their use of the Anatolian languages. These peoples were among the oldest Indo-European ethnolinguistic groups and one of the most archaic, because Anatolians were among the first Indo-European peoples to separate from the Proto-Indo-European community that gave origin to the individual Indo-European peoples. Together with the Proto-Tocharians, who migrated eastward, the Anatolian peoples constituted the first known waves of Indo-European emigrants out of the Eurasian steppe. It is likely that they reached Anatolia from the north, via the Balkans or the Caucasus, in the 3rd millennium BC. This movement has yet to be documented archaeologically. Although they had wagons, they probably emigrated before Indo-Europeans had learned to use chariots for war. Comparison of Hittite agricultural terms with those of other Indo-European subgroups indicate that the Anatolian peoples seceded from the other Indo-Europeans before the establishment of a common agricultural nomenclature, which suggests that they entered the Near East as a cohesive people through a common route. The Anatolian peoples were intruders in an area in which the local population had already founded cities, established literate bureaucracies and established kingdoms and palace cults. Once they entered the region, the cultures of the local populations, in particular the Hattians, significantly influenced them linguistically, politically and religiously. Christopher I. Beckwith suggests that the Anatolian peoples initially gained a foothold in Anatolia after being hired by the Hattians to fight other invading Indo-European groups. The earliest linguistic and historical attestation of the Anatolian peoples are names mentioned in Assyrian mercantile texts from 19th Century BC at Kanesh. Kanesh was at the time the center of a network of Assyrian merchants overseeing trade between Assyria and the warring states of Anatolia.