= Paper =

In 13th century BCE Hittite texts some words are marked with special signs called 'gloss-wedges'.  It is generally assumed that they were used to mark words of foreign, mostly Luwian origin.  However, a semantic analysis of the relevant vocabulary reveals that if the words had been marked because of their foreign origin, this would seem to have been a form of extreme linguistic purism serving nationalistic purposes.  Because of the lack of evidence for nationalistic tendencies in Hittite texts and Hittite culture in general this seems highly implausible.   On the other hand, a thorough investigation of contexts in which words with gloss-wedges appear gives reasons to assume that words were marked with gloss-wedges for ideological purposes, i.e. to shape moral identity and enforce a proper code of conduct in the last decades of the Hittite Empire