Hittite Studies in Honor of Harry A. Hoffner, Jr


Book Description

A tribute to America's preeminent scholar of Hittite language and culture, Professor Harry A. Hoffner, Jr., of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. The thirty-four contributors, students, and colleagues treat topics as diverse as Hittite contacts with the Mycenaean Greeks, the topography of the Hittite capital, and various aspects of Hittite grammar and etymology.




From Hittite to Homer


Book Description

This book takes a bold new approach to the prehistory of Homeric epic, arguing for a fresh understanding of how Near Eastern influence worked.




A History of Hittite Literacy


Book Description

The first comprehensive overview of the development of literacy, script usage, and literature in Hittite Anatolia (1650-1200 BC).




The Hittite Middle Voice


Book Description

In this book, Inglese offers a new description of the middle voice in Hittite, both from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. The analysis is based on a corpus of original Hittite texts and is framed within current trends in linguistic typology.




Royal Hittite Instructions and Related Administrative Texts


Book Description

Few compositions provide as much insight into the structure of the Hittite state and the nature of Hittite society as the so-called Instructions. While these texts may strike the modern reader as didactic, the Hittites, who categorized them together with state treaties, understood them as “contracts” or “obligations,” consisting of the king’s instructions to officials such as priests and temple personnel, mayors, military officers, border garrison commanders, and palace servants. They detail how and in what spirit the officials are to carry out their duties and what consequences they are to suffer for failure. Also included are several examples of closely related oath impositions and oaths. Collecting for the first time the entire corpus of Hittite Instructions, this accessible volume presents these works in transliteration of the original texts and translation, with clear and readable introductory essays, references to primary and secondary sources, and thorough indices.




Pax Hethitica


Book Description

Mit Pax Hethitica erscheint die Festschrift fur Itamar Singer, langjahriger Professor an der Universitat Tel Aviv und fuhrender Hethitologe und Historiker des Alten Orients. Die Festschrift enthalt 34 Beitrage von seinen Kollegen aus der Altanatolistik und Altorientalistik vor allem zu hethitologischen, aber auch zu assyriologischen, syrischen, indogermanischen und agaischen Themen. Die vielfaltigen Beitrage entsprechen den umfassenden Forschungsinteressen des Jubilars, die weit uber die Grenzen Anatoliens und der Hethitologie hinausreichen. Mit Beitragen von: A. Altman, A. Archi, T. Bryce, B.J. Collins, L. d'Alfonso, S. de Martino, A. Dincol, B. Dincol, Y. Feder, M. Forlanini, M. Giorgieri, S. Gordin, J.D. Hawkins, V. Haas, S. Heinhold-Krahmer, H.A. Hoffner, Jr., C. Karasu, H.C. Melchert, C. Mora, N. Oettinger, I. Peled, F. Pecchioli Daddi, M. Poetto, M. Popko, A.F. Rainey, E. Rieken, D. Schwemer, O. Soysal, I. Tati'vili, P. Taracha, G. Torri, T. van den Hout, G. Wilhelm, I. Yakubovich, A. Yasur-Landau und R. Zadok




The Hittite Gilgamesh


Book Description

From the late third millennium BCE on, the adventures of the hero Gilgamesh were well known throughout Babylonia and Assyria, and the discovery of Akkadian-language fragments of versions of his tale at Boğazkoy, Ugarit, Emar, and Megiddo demonstrates that tales of the hero's exploits had reached the periphery of the cuneiform world already in the Late Bronze Age. A century of excavation at the Hittite capital of Hattusa (mod. Boğazkoy) has yielded more textual sources for Gilgamesh than are known from all other Late Bronze Age sites combined. The Gilgamesh tradition was imported to Hattusa for use in scribal instruction, and has been of particular importance to modern scholars in reconstructing the epic and analyzing its development, since it documents a period in the history of the narrative for which very few textual witnesses have yet been recovered from Mesopotamia itself. And it is this very Middle Babylonian period to which scholarly consensus assigns the composition of the final, "canonical" version of the epic. The Hittite Gilgamesh offers a full edition of the manuscripts from Hattusa in the Hittite, Akkadian, and Hurrian languages recounting Gilgamesh's adventures.




Mythogenesis, Interdiscursivity, Ritual


Book Description

The studies included in Mythogenesis, Interdiscursivity, Ritual —offered to Professor Demetrios Yatromanolakis, a pioneering scholar— shed new light on a variety of areas: the encounters of ancient Greece with other societies and cultures in antiquity; the interplay between art (vase-painting and sculpture) and broader ideological developments/mentalities in antiquity; ritual in ancient Greek contexts; political ideologies and religion; history of scholarship, textual criticism/critical editing, and hermeneutics; the reception of myth and of archaic and classical Greek culture and philosophy in diverse discursive, mediatic, and sociocultural contexts — from impressionist painting, to modernism and the avant-garde, to Foucauldian thought.




Hittite Texts and Greek Religion


Book Description

Our knowledge of ancient Greece has been transformed in the last century by an increased understanding of the cultures of the Ancient Near East. This is particularly true of ancient religion. This book looks at the relationship between the religious systems of Ancient Greece and the Hittites, who controlled Turkey in the Late Bronze Age (1400-1200 BC). The cuneiform texts preserved in the Hittite archives provide a particularly rich source for religious practice, detailing festivals, purification rituals, oracle-consultations, prayers, and myths of the Hittite state, as well as documenting the religious practice of neighbouring Anatolian states in which the Hittites took an interest. Hittite religion is thus more comprehensively documented than any other ancient religious tradition in the Near East, even Egypt. The Hittites are also known to have been in contact with Mycenaean Greece, known to them as Ahhiyawa. The book first sets out the evidence and provides a methodological paradigm for using comparative data. It then explores cases where there may have been contact or influence, such as in the case of scapegoat rituals or the Kumarbi-Cycle. Finally, it considers key aspects of religious practices shared by both systems, such as the pantheon, rituals of war, festivals, and animal sacrifice. The aim of such a comparison is to discover clues that may further our understanding of the deep history of religious practices and, when used in conjunction with historical data, illuminate the differences between cultures and reveal what is distinctive about each of them.




Cursed Are You!


Book Description

This is a book about curses. It is not about curses as insults or offensive language but curses as petitions to the divine world to render judgment and execute harm on identified, hostile forces. In the ancient world, curses functioned in a way markedly different from our own, and it is into the world of the ancient Near East that we must go in order to appreciate the scope of their influence. For the ancient Near Easterners, curses had authentic meaning. Curses were part of their life and religion. They were not inherently magic or features of superstitions, nor were they mere curiosities or trifling antidotes. They were real and effective. They were employed proactively and reactively to manage life’s many vicissitudes and maintain social harmony. They were principally protective, but they were also the cause of misfortune, illness, depression, and anything else that undermined a comfortable, well-balanced life. Every member of society used them, from slave to king, from young to old, from men and women to the deities themselves. They crossed cultural lines and required little or no explanation, for curses were the source of great evil. In other words, curses were universal. Because curses were woven into the very fabric of every known ancient Near Eastern society, they emerge frequently and in a wide variety of venues. They appear on public and private display objects, on tomb stelae, tomb lintels, and sarcophagi, on ancient kudurrus and narûs. They are used in political, administrative, social, religious, and familial contexts. They are the subject of incantations. They are tools that exorcise demons and dispel disease; they ban, protect, and heal. This is the phenomenology of cursing in the ancient Near East, and this is what the present work explores.