Clay fragment at Hattusa adds lines to ancient peace treaty

A broken bit of clay found in Türkiye has been identified as part of a peace treaty between two ancient empires.

The piece is written in cuneiform, the script made by pressing small wedge shapes into wet clay. Specialists matched its surviving lines to copies of the Kadesh Peace Treaty, the agreement between the Hittite and Egyptian empires. The link was reported on 22 September 2026 by Daily Sabah.

The fragment was found at Hattusa in Türkiye, the old Hittite city now worked as an archaeological site. The findspot was near Building E at Büyükkale, a palace and storehouse zone inside the site. Tablets were often kept, filed and lost around such official buildings, so the location helps explain how the piece survived in the ground.

Only part of the text can still be read. It concerns fugitives. According to HeritageDaily, the surviving signs mention people fleeing from both Egypt and the Hittite kingdom, and the rules for what should happen to them.

Clauses like that were practical. They told officials on each side who had to be sent back, and how. For families and workers caught between two courts, those few lines were the detail that made peace work day to day.

News of the find spread over two days. First accounts appeared on 21 September 2026, with fuller descriptions following on 22 September 2026. That sequence is common with excavation finds, where an initial notice is followed by a closer reading of the signs.

The wider agreement was concluded between Hattusili III and Ramses II, the two names given for the treaty parties in the United Nations collection. It is described by Anadolu Ajansı as the world’s oldest known peace treaty. Copies are known from Egyptian and Hittite sources, which is why a new fragment from Hattusa can be checked against wording found elsewhere.

What makes this fun, even if you never read a clay tablet, is the human subject. This is not a royal boast. It is admin. Who runs away, who takes them in, who sends them home.

The new piece is small and its readable text is short. But it gives researchers a few more signs from a deal that survives only in pieces, and one more reason to keep sorting the clay from Hattusa.