Hitti and Near East Studies

From Nikolai:  ""My dad actually knew Hitti as a student (in the 1960′s). He said that one day during a meeting with students, Hitti explained the difficulty of setting up the Near Eastern Studies program; “They were all archaeologists, and wanted to keep on teaching Akkadian and Hebrew. They didn’t think they needed Arabic. I told them, ‘people live there now! You have to understand them now!’”"