Fragment of world's oldest known peace treaty found in Turkey

Archaeologists have discovered a 3,400-year-old fragment of the world's oldest known peace treaty in Turkey, the country's Ministry of Culture and Tourism has announced. The fragment belongs to the Treaty of Kadesh, signed around 1269 B.C. by the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II and the Hittite king Hattusili III.

What was found at Hattusha

The cuneiform tablet fragment was unearthed during excavations at Hattusha, in north-central Turkey, the ancient capital of the Hittite Empire. According to the ministry's statement, the text comes from the section of the treaty that deals with the treatment of refugees.

"We have found traces of peace, thousands of years old, in the soil of Anatolia," Turkey's minister of culture and tourism, Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, said in a Sept. 21 translated statement. "It reminds us of our responsibility to protect human life and dignity."

A Bronze Age agreement

The Hittite Empire controlled central Anatolia from about 1650 to 1200 B.C., during the Bronze Age. Excavations at Hattusha have yielded many diplomatic documents written in Akkadian, the earliest documented Semitic language.

The two rulers signed the treaty around 1269 B.C. to end a long war between ancient Egypt and the Hittite Empire, and it is regarded as the world's oldest known peace treaty. It is also called the Egyptian-Hittite peace treaty, the Eternal Treaty or the Silver Treaty.

How the text survived

The treaty was preserved through inscriptions in two ancient cities: a hieroglyphic version found in the early 19th century on the walls of a temple dedicated to Ramesses II in Thebes, modern Luxor, and Akkadian cuneiform fragments first identified at Hattusha in the early 20th century.

The agreement ended a two-century-long war over lands in the eastern Mediterranean and marked a military détente between the two rulers. In the translated text, one passage reads: "He is a brother to me and he is at peace with me; and I am a brother to him and I am forever at peace with him."

The treaty also provides for coming to the aid of a country that is invaded. On refugees, it says that anyone who fled from Egypt to Hattusha would be returned to Egypt, and anyone who fled from Hattusha to Egypt would be returned to Hattusha, because fleeing was considered a crime. But it specifically forbids punishing them: "Their tongue and their eyes are not to be pulled out; their ears and their feet are not to be cut off; their houses with their wives and their children are not to be destroyed." Part of that text appears on the newly discovered fragment.

A copper replica of the Treaty of Kadesh is displayed today in the United Nations Conference Building in New York City. According to the U.N., the treaty pledges "eternal friendship, lasting peace, territorial integrity, nonaggression, extradition, and mutual help."