David Hawkins, my colleague and friend, who has died aged 83, was one of the world’s leading scholars of the languages of ancient Turkey.
He spent all his career at Soas University of London. He was appointed fellow in Hittite at Soas in 1964 and retired as professor in 2005. Hittite, the oldest known Indo-European language, was then only taught at Oxford, by Oliver Gurney, to whom David went to learn the language in which he had been appointed.
