Are we able to read ancient Hittite? The article didn’t say if they were able to decipher the text, which would be interesting to know.
Yup, for a long while. Emil Forrer was a Swiss scholar who worked on the Hattusas archive. The archive consisted of three groups — two large groups which each contained a different unknown language, the other group being ‘other’.
While reading a text (cuneiform can always be pronounced, which is why it was adapted to so many ancient languages, indeed, used for over 3000 years, or about the length of time we’ve used alphabetic script, with which it overlapped) he noticed some word structures (not sure what they were, have to look that up; but something like suffixes) that were very much like German.
One of the two major languages in the archive proved to be an extinct Indo-European tongue. The other isn’t.