1 The Cuneiform Koiné
In this volume, the term ‘cuneiform koiné’ will generally denote the group of cultures, occasionally identified with political entities, that at a given stage of their historical development adopted the cuneiform writing system.1 This concept is a valid spatial and diachronic periodization tool to better identify what we commonly call, rather vaguely and aniconically, the ancient Near East. It can be used to describe a reasonably consistent cultural area that involved several groups, peoples, and languages until the middle centuries of the first millennium BCE.2
Based on this definition, the ancient Near East would include a core area that consisted of Mesopotamia and Euphratic Syria and peripheries at varying distances from the core (western Iran, the northern Persian Gulf, the Levant, the northern Tigris, and, most importantly for this book, central, eastern and southeastern Anatolia). Egypt and the southern portions of the Levant were involved in the wider cuneiform network in the age of Amarna, but despite long-established contacts were divided by a cultural boundary from the cuneiform koiné (although, of course, the boundary was scalar, blurry, and permeable as is always the case in cultural geography).3
But how can the cuneiform koiné be an adequate representation of the cultural area of the ancient Near East? Can the diffusion of the cuneiform writing system adequately represent the cultural area? And, based on this criterion, can we explain what features Hittite Anatolia, northern Syria, and southern Mesopotamia have in common that Egypt, for instance, did not entirely share?
When considering the diffusion of cuneiform beyond Mesopotamia, we should not understand this writing system as a mere technology to record spoken language. While such a definition may be helpful for the investigations of the linguists and to disambiguate proper writing systems from simpler semiotic codes (such as the clay tokens used for early accounting), it is a very inadequate definition when the emphasis is put on the cultural significance and implications of the functions and patterns of diffusion of a script.
Cuneiform is a logo-syllabary that exhibited a functional quasi-optimality for the rendering of the linguistic code of the Sumerian area in the third millennium BCE. It had developed from a proto-cuneiform semiotic system that slowly evolved toward a glottographic phase. However, anthropic systems hardly ever evolve in a linear and tidy fashion: describing a framework in which a system evolved completely in isolation before being transferred to other areas in an orderly fashion would have been an easier task, but interference was at work during the glottographic definition of the Sumerian cuneiform writing system, and local adaptations started to emerge in the closer peripheral areas. The development of cuneiform advanced contemporaneously in Syria and Mesopotamia, with interconnections between the Sumerian, Syrian, and Mesopotamian Semitic traditions that produced, in some cases, scribal environments like that in Ebla in the 24th century BCE, in which Mesopotamian traditions, local substrate systems, and imported practices mingled. The result was a sort of stratified system in which the exact steps of alteration and evolution of the logo-syllabary and local traditions sometimes cannot be discerned.
Apart from noting the complexity of the diffusion, which involved Upper Mesopotamia, Elam, and Syria during the third millennium BCE and then spread to the neighboring areas, including Anatolia, during the second, it is important to be aware that cuneiform was a complex cultural construct. It was not limited to a system of glyphs that evolved both graphemically (functionally) and paleographically (formally),4 but featured a system for organizing and representing knowledge (religious, literary, scientific, and administrative) and a conception of society based on the preservation of human memory through the written word (from the microsocial level of a single legal transaction to the political horizon of the building or narrative inscription dictated by a king). In this context, the adoption of cuneiform can be considered truly complete only when the culture adopting it adapts the script to its functional needs (local language, selection or creation of technical jargon, production of a specific type of documents, etc.). Furthermore, the use of cuneiform implies the acquisition of the cultural heritage the writing system carries.
The cultures that entered the cuneiform koiné did not merely adopt a syllabary. Rather, they adopted a tradition that began in the southern Mesopotamian cultural milieu and contributed to maintaining and perpetuating it. A clear indicator of this is the diffusion of Sumerian and Akkadian literature in the most peripheral areas. Just as a marker of classical culture was knowing Homer, fragments of the Gilgameš poem found in the Hittite archives, including parts of a Hittite and a Hurrian translation,5 could tempt us to say that knowing the literary tradition about the King of Uruk was a marker of Near Eastern culture.
Adopting cuneiform implied the adoption of a complex cultural system: in Hatti, lexical lists and literary materials from the Mesopotamian tradition were copied, translated, and re-elaborated. As cuneiform Akkadian began to be used for administrative purposes in land grants (see Chapter 8 for a discussion), the juridical jargon and formulas combined local innovations and inheritances from the Syro-Mesopotamian world. Literary topoi of the Mesopotamian tradition entered the Hittite textual production. Even though the quantity of evidence varies from one area to the next, the same principles seem to apply elsewhere, such as in the West Semitic cultures of the Levant. For example, consider the lexical lists produced in cities like Ugarit or the synonym list mallku = šarru, which includes Elamite, Hittite, and Hurrian words.6 Such lists testify to the amplitude of an areal phenomenon that we can read only in part.
2 Cuneiform in Anatolia: The General Context
2.1 Cuneiform in the Peripheries
The literature on the diffusion of cuneiform and Akkadian suggests the adoption of a model of diffusion that appears linear and quasi-unidirectional, at least in its initial stages. A core area can be identified that coincides with southern Mesopotamia (probably the best choice in considering the diffusion of the writing system) or Mesopotamia as a whole (when considering the diffusion of the Akkadian language rather than the writing system). The other regions in which various cultures adopted the cuneiform linguistic and cultural toolset are generally referred to as ‘peripheral.’
It is not hard to imagine that the toolset spread more or less directly from the core to the most distant areas of the periphery, including the Syrian areas of the Euphrates valley or the Jazira. Nor is the timing problematic. Cuneiform reached Syria sometime during the Early Dynastic third millennium; one might even challenge Syria’s designation as a peripheral area and argue that the areas of Ebla and Mari, quite different from one another, were part of the region that adopted the writing and connected cultural system from a very early stage. The earliest cuneiform documents from Elam seem also to date to the third millennium and probably pattern graphemically with the Old Akkadian stage of the script.
The situation becomes blurrier during the Middle Bronze Age. The crisis of the Second Urbanization increased cultural mobility in the former outskirts of the (Syro-)Mesopotamian world, and cuneiform, as a result, now appeared to be steadily employed by populations that, according to the available evidence, did not share the orthographic standardization of the central Old Babylonian world but derived their graphemic praxis from the system that was typical of the Old Akkadian age.7 The Hurrian principalities of the Jazira, Syrian centers such as Alalah, and northern Mesopotamian and Anatolian archives of the Old Assyrian kingdom and its outposts seemed to develop strategies for the writing of stops and sibilants that were different from those developed in Old Babylonian southern Mesopotamia.
Among the geographically and genealogically non-Anatolian and non-Semitic languages, Hurrian is most relevant to the study of the diffusion of cuneiform to the western peripheries. By their geographical collocation, the Jazira principalities, during the Middle and Late Bronze Age, and those Hurrian groups and polities that settled in western Syria, were necessarily involved in the diffusion of the writing system to the north and west.
The literature on Hurrian and the Hurrians is rich if a little fragmented, but the historical reconstructions, except for the history of the main polity, Mittani, are not as numerous as the studies of language and religion. The main reference works remain those by Wilhelm (1989) and Salvini (2000a, 2000b). The Hurrian settlements in the Jazira and Upper Mesopotamia (cf. Chapter 10) produced, starting from the third millennium, texts that employed a type of cuneiform that generally patterned with the Old Akkadian system.
The Hurrian cuneiform traditions are quite inhomogeneous. Middle Bronze Age texts from Mari (Thureau-Dangin 1939) show features that are similar to those of the locally produced Akkadian texts, which were mostly Old Babylonian, but this is a very site-specific phenomenon. The Late Bronze Age Mittanian system, on the other hand, had different ways of treating syllables formed by a stop and a vowel, designating some signs for the rendering of specific vowels (Giorgieri 2000a), but are overall consistent with a peripheral tradition. As for the Hurrian texts produced in Hattuša from the XV century onwards, they are rather inconsistent, and to some extent appear to be influenced by the graphemic system of Hittite.
By the mature Late Bronze Age, the use of cuneiform, along with a standardized variety of Akkadian we will call international Akkadian (cf. Chapter 8), was diffused throughout the Levant, Canaan, and the famous, all-important Egyptian archive of El Amarna. Cuneiform may also have been known at this stage in some extremely peripheral regions, including western Anatolia, if the Amarna Letters EA 31 and 32—written in Hittite instead of Akkadian—were prepared in a Luwian scribal office. Peripheral archives such as Emar or Ugarit, especially active during the 14th and 13th centuries, testify to the mixing of the Middle Babylonian linguistic and scribal culture with local West Semitic vernaculars. However, some of the standardizing power of the lingua franca is visible in most of these local productions.
The wave of ‘cuneiformization’ of most areas of the ancient Near East continued until the crisis at the end of the Bronze Age. The very different situation that emerged after the storm is material for a different section of this work and will be discussed in Volume 2.
2.2 The Wave Hits Anatolia
The penetration of cuneiform in Anatolia is a phenomenon that belongs to the earlier phases of the diffusion of this writing technology. As discussed in Chapter 4, cuneiform came into use in Anatolia during the Middle Bronze Age, in the socioeconomic setting of the Old Assyrian trading network. The extension of the adoption of the writing technology, geographically speaking, can only be speculated upon, but it is reasonable to assume that the centers that were involved in the trades and visited by Assyrian traders or their associates had, or may have had, scribal facilities of some sort. This provides us with a potential area of diffusion of the writing that reached the west-central center of Purušhanda, to the west, Hattuša and its sub-region to the north. The area is large, and it is difficult to guess to what extent the writing system was adopted by non-Assyrians. Certainly it was used in Kaneš, as proven by the archives of Anatolians and the evidence for Anatolian or at least non-Assyrian scribes. A few non-commercial documents also indicate that writing cuneiform letters was a practice that was not unknown at the courts of local princes.8
Anitta’s adventures, which can be dated to the final decades of the 18th century, and the newly published Wiušti’s letter from Hattuša (KBo 71.81) indicate that by roughly this time the Anatolian principalities wrote Akkadian in an Old Assyrian fashion. The gap separating this phase from the second half of the 17th century and the reigns of Hattušili I and Muršili I must have been characterized by a cultural and political reshaping, with the almost complete forfeiting of the kārum scribal tradition and a reintroduction of cuneiform writing in Anatolia, probably following a North Syrian trajectory of diffusion. Ultimately, even the Akkadian documents from the Old Hittite kingdom presented Babylonian linguistic features rather than Assyrian ones.9
This stage corresponded, more or less, to the phase of the diffusion of cuneiform in the peripheries in the mature and final Middle Bronze Age. An Old Babylonian version of Akkadian was employed in northern Syria, where the cultural and political hegemony was shifting from Mari to the emerging Yamhad polity. Paleographically, level VII of the stratigraphy of Alalah returned cuneiform texts whose ductus resembles that of the first documents that emerge from the Hittite archives of Hattuša.
If we simplify and summarize decades of scholarly debate,10 we find two main theories about the path of penetration of the cuneiform culture in Hittite Anatolia. What we will call the ‘paleography-centered’ theory compares the shape of the signs used in Hattuša in the Old Hittite phase with those employed in the surrounding areas of the cuneiform koiné and concludes that the best match is, as previously mentioned, represented by the syllabary employed in Alalah in the late Middle Bronze Age and early Late Bronze Age. The second view is represented by the ‘graphemics-centered’ theory, which emphasizes the similarity between the function of specific sets of consonant-vowel signs in some peripheral varieties of Akkadian and—allegedly—in Hurrian and concludes that the ‘cuneiformization’ of the Hurrian and Hittite worlds were part of the same wave that diffused the technology of writing.
An optimist would be tempted to conclude that the two hypotheses could be combined in a comprehensive theory because of the presence of many Hurrian names in the main cities of northern Syria, Alalah and Mari (Oliva Monpeán 1999, with references to previous literature). But despite the paleographic similarity between the Alalah VII and (Old) Hittite ductus, verifying the claim of a graphemic close connection between the Hurrian and Hittite cuneiform systems turns out to be tricky. Since one of the claims that belong to the general model proposed in this monograph is that the status of Hurrian in Anatolia was sociolinguistically and culturally prominent only from the late 15th century BCE, tackling the issue of the alleged Hurrian role in the transmission of cuneiform of Anatolia is unavoidable.
The arguments are, as previously stated, graphemic, and go back to the work by Hart (1983). It was suggested that some similar developments exist in the functional features of cuneiform signs in Hurrian and Hittite, which include limiting the use of the sign PI to writing the syllable with an approximant w followed by a vowel (and, in the case of Hurrian, also a syllable with a labiodental onset) and not distinguishing between signs with a voiced and voiceless onset for ‘stop + vowel’ signs. The biggest problem in evaluating these arguments is trying to understand what the term ‘Hurrian cuneiform system’ is supposed to mean. The Hurrians used a version of the Old Akkadian syllabary to compose their earliest texts, in the third millennium BCE. These were written in Akkadian (for further details on this stage, cf. Chapter 10, § 2). During the Middle Bronze Age, Hurrian texts were composed in northern Syria: the Hurrian tablets from Mari testify to the use of the sign PI for glide-onset-syllables only, but there appears to be a distinction in the function of the voiced and voiceless signs for stop+vowel syllables. Nothing in these documents points to a direct connection with the treatment of stops in the Hittite writing system (where double writings vC-Cv indicate either a fortis or a voiceless consonant and v-CV indicates a lenis or voiced one) or with the specialization of these signs to distinguish specific vowel colors11 as will be the case in the system employed by the Hurrians of Mittani during the Amarna age (14th century BCE). The system used for the writing of Hurrian texts in Hattuša, starting from the 15th century BCE, is inconsistent and certainly partly influenced by the Hittite system, which makes its employment in this analysis impossible to avoid circular argumentation.
The weakness of these arguments is self-evident. The treatment of stop-onset-signs is immediately qualifiable as inconsistent when comparing the different Hurrian traditions with each other and with the Hittite one. With the partial exception of Mari Hurrian, all are explained within the context of a peripheral cuneiform tradition that derives not from the Old Babylonian system, that was later enriched by independent and only partly similar innovations.
The same observation applies to the specialization of PI (MZL 598) to write syllables that start with an approximant (or, again, a labiovelar fricative). While it is true that both the Hittite system and the ‘Hurrian’ system(s) share this innovation, its importance has been overemphasized. It was certainly a monogenetic change in the functions of the syllabary, but it was not unique to these traditions.
Another peculiarity of the cuneiform systems adapted to the writing of non-Akkadian texts in Hittite and Hurrian is the specialized use of the signs containing sibilants. The traditional cuneiform system offered some options: the series of Š signs (ŠA, ŠI, ŠU), the series of S signs (SA, SI, SU), the series of Ṣ-signs (ṢI/E and ṢU [=ZUM]; ṢA coincides with ZA), the series of Z-signs (ZA, ZI/E, ZU). Over the centuries, these signs took on alternative values that in part reflect the complex relationship between different local traditions, with the same sign employed for the continuants of different Proto-Semitic sibilants in different areas (Gelb 1947; Goetze 1958). When adapting the cuneiform system to render the phonology of Hittite, only two series were used: the palatalized Š-series for the non-palatalized fricatives (v-Šv and vŠ-Šv for /s/and /ss/, with no available data on possible voiced allophones) and the Z-series for the affricate /ts/. Gamrkrelidze (2008) compared this situation with the signs selected for the notation of consonants in Hurrian (notwithstanding the obstacles encountered in defining a single Hurrian scribal praxis) and correctly concluded that neither the system employed in the Mittani letter nor in the early North Syrian texts from Mari have any features in common with the Hittite adaptations.12 In general, Hurrian employs the Š-series and the Z-series with a certain degree of interchangeability, at least in Mittani, while the system adopted in the Hurrian texts from Hattuša partly shares this feature and partly appears to be influenced by the Hittite syllabographic inventory. (The writing of Hurrian in Hattuša belongs to a later stage and employing it to discuss the introduction of cuneiform would result in circular argumentation). As the Hittites were active in Syria in the earliest phases of the age of Hatti (cf. Chapter 5, § 2), it is worth taking a closer look at the Hurrian texts produced in Mari during the Middle Bronze Age. As correctly observed by Jäntti (2017:22), the area of Mari is the one in which the Hittites of early Hatti might have interacted with Hurrian traditions; here also the sibilants are rendered with the S-sign series (Thureau-Dangin 1939, Gamkrelidze 2008), a feature absent in the Hittite syllabary.
In general, the idea that Hurrian played a role in the diffusion of cuneiform to Anatolia is based on an outdated representation of the geography, history, and functional features of the peripheral versions of the script. Both Hurrian and Hittite adapted cuneiform to the rendering of non-Semitic languages, and both acquired the syllabary from a phase and area that were not included in the orthographic regularization of southern Mesopotamian Old Babylonian. But the connection is limited to this, and no proof exists that a Hurrian or Hurrianized milieu was part of the transmission. What is certain, on the other hand, is the paleographic contiguity of Hittite cuneiform and the syllabary of Old Babylonian Alalah, which leads us to the only conclusion that can be reached about the penetration in Anatolia of the cuneiform used by the Hittites: it originated in a Syro-Anatolia interface area at some point between the last years of the Middle Bronze Age and the early Late Bronze Age and derived from local traditions that developed out of an Old Akkadian syllabary rather than from an Old Babylonian one.
Soon after attaining power, Hattušili I adopted the expansive policies of his predecessors but pushed his claims well beyond the limits of central Anatolia. As told in his bilingual Akkadian-Hittite annals, Hattušili I crossed the Taurus and marched against various Syrian cities. Among these were Zalwar, Uršu and Haššu, but the most prominent was certainly Alalah (modern Tell Açana in the Amuq valley), which Hattušili I raided twice. Excavations carried out at Tell Açana/Alalah since the 1940s have brought to light a sequence of two tablet corpora, the oldest of which, from level VII, provides information on political and economic affairs in and around the city in the decades preceding Hattušili’s attacks. We know, therefore, that during the 18th and 17th centuries, Alalah was a major satellite of the powerful kingdom of Yamhad, which was centered in Aleppo. The cuneiform texts uncovered at Alalah VII show striking graphic and graphemic similarities with the Boğazköy ductus that is typical of later Hittite texts, which in turn is very different from Old Assyrian cuneiform. Therefore, it is generally—albeit not universally—maintained that, after the kārum Ia hiatus, cuneiform was reintroduced in Anatolia by Hattušili I as he returned from Syria.13 This process likely involved the hiring of Syrian scribes or even their seizure as war prisoners to employ in Hittite scriptoria. The Akkadian of Hattušili I’s Annals shows close formal affinities with variants of that language attested in Syria around the time of Hattušili’s raids that could identify the author as a native Syrian scribe.14 Also, the Akkadian letter sent by Hattušili I to Tunip-Teššub, ruler of the Upper Mesopotamian kingdom of Tikunani, appears to be the work of a Syrian scribe.15 In this document, certainly an original and probably the earliest known product of a Hittite chancery, Hattušili I introduces himself only as Labarna, inaugurating the use of this personal name as a title. The possibility that King Labarna himself was the author of the letter is not very attractive since the interactions between Hatti and Tikunani described in the letter involve an Euphratic area—Zalwar, Hahhu, and Tikunani—closely matching the known geographic sphere of Hattušili’s actions. Moreover, Hattušili I is known to have used the title tabarna, a variant of labarna, in both the Akkadian and Hittite versions of his Annals.
Another early Hittite document with strong Syrian affinities is the Siege of Uršu (KBo 1.11). This text was also written in Akkadian, but its cuneiform complies with Syrian graphic traditions rather than the Syrianizing Boğazköy ductus, and recent archaeometric analyses on the tablet confirm that it was produced in Syria.16 Unlike the Tikunani letter, which was directed to a foreign court and used Akkadian as the international lingua franca, the Uršu text belonged to the archives of Hattuša and dealt with a topic relevant to a Hittite audience in the times of Hattušili I, who claims to have campaigned at Uršu on his way back from the first expedition to Alalah. Indeed, the Uršu text is probably the earliest known original text from Hattuša.17
In summary, the expansionist ventures of Hattušili I and their continuation under Muršili I not only placed Hattuša/Hatti at the center of a hegemonic kingdom in Anatolia but also transcended the kingdom’s natural barriers, revitalizing contacts with the cultural traditions of the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. From this time onwards, the archives and scriptoria of Hattuša, and later those elsewhere in central Anatolia, hosted a copious cuneiform textual production that continued until the demise of the Hittite kingdom. Of course, not all periods of Hittite history are documented with equal intensity, and the Old Kingdom is one of the least known. This is due to the finding conditions of Hittite archives as well as the very processes that formed them. At Hattuša most tablets and tablet fragments were not found in situ (i.e., close to their original archival collocation) but rather in secondary contexts. Although significant archival groups can be identified, chiefly those from the Great Temple, Büyükkale Building A, and the Haus am Hang (House on the Slope), no collection matching, for example, the wonderful preservation of Ebla’s archives has been detected at Hattuša.18 Moreover, record management in the Hittite archives inevitably involved the dumping of many documents considered no longer necessary or obsolete to free up space to shelve new records. Only those texts that retained their relevance were kept or copied across generations.
Almost all the records that survive from the Old Kingdom up to the reign of Muršili I are known from later copies. Most contain (pseudo-)historiographic content. They include monolingual texts written in Akkadian or Hittite and bilingual texts using both languages. The Annals of Hattušili I and his Political Testament (CTH 6) belong to the latter category.19 Another text generally attributed to Hattušili I, the Edict (CTH 5), as well as the Anitta text and some fragmentary Res Gestae of either Hattušili I or Muršili I, are monolingual (written in Hittite).20 Textual production in Hittite harking back to the formative stages of the Hittite state also comprises a group of historico-didactic texts: the Palace Chronicle,21 the Tale of Zalp(uw)a, the Puhanu text (CTH 16),22 and KBo 3.60 (better known as the Cannibal Text).23 The only two originals from this period, namely, the Uršu text and Tikunani letter, are both written monolingually in Akkadian, although the former includes several Hittite words and even an entire sentence.
In contrast with the rich coeval documentation available for the previous period, there are very few testimonies of textual production dating to the generations between Muršili I and Telipinu. Remnants may include some tiny fragments of historical accounts attributed to Hantili I (but perhaps Hantili II!)24 and Ammuna,25 all preserved in Hittite from NS copies. The latter king is also known from an original text: an Akkadian course formula inscribed on a bronze ax.26
A new phase of revitalized scribal production coincides with the reign of Telipinu. This king is famous for a lengthy document, termed the Edict of Telipinu (CTH 19), which is preserved in multiple later copies. These include both a Hittite version and fragments of an Akkadian version.27 This text opens with a long historical prologue (§§ 1–27), in which the author offers his perspective on Hittite political history from the heyday of Labarna and focuses on the factional strife that afflicted the court from the reign of Muršili I until Telipinu’s accession. A normative section (§§ 28–50) is presented as an attempt to put an end to endemic conflicts through the (re)affirmation of succession rules and administrative reform. Besides the edict, Telipinu signed the first known Hittite international treaty, which was negotiated with Išputahšu of Kizzuwatna. This was a parity treaty, in which two parties reciprocally acknowledge each other’s power sphere, and was drafted in both an Akkadian and a Hittite version (CTH 21.I–II).28
Telipinu is credited with having inaugurated the tradition of the Landschenkungsurkunden (LSU), a well-defined group of royal grants through which Hittite kings transferred lands and/or other resources (a labor force, livestock, etc.) from one subject, generally an institution, to notable individuals.29 Each of the grants is a unique document, inscribed on a pillow-shaped tablet sealed in the central field of the obverse by the ruler issuing the transaction. This is a guarantee that all extant LSU were written when issued and were originals in their time. The presence of the royal seal would also seem to be crucial for dating the LSU. However, several LSU bear anonymous royal seals (called tabarna seals for their use of royal titles alone as identifiers of the issuing authority). Fortunately, comparisons of the witness lists that accompanied each grant recently permitted fine-tuning the relative chronologies. Thus it was verified that most if not all of the LSU bearing tabarna seals date to the reign of Telipinu. Nonetheless, Rüster and Wilhelm (2012:49–51) do not exclude the possibility that LSU nos. 1 and 2 were issued by Huzziya I or even Ammuna, that is, a generation or two before Telipinu. The earliest kings attested by name on LSU are the immediate successors of Telipinu, Alluwamna and Hantili II. The tradition continued thereafter in almost every reign except that of Tuthaliya I (whose name is associated with at least one land grant) until Arnuwanda I and his wife Ašmunikkal (late 15th century), who issued the last known document of this kind (LSU no. 91).
All LSU issued up to the reign of Muwattalli I are drafted in an Akkadian conforming to Old Babylonian, with sporadic Hittite insertions for technical terms and topographic indications (cf. also Chapter 8, § 3.2). The texts follow a fixed structure, marked by a set of formulas perhaps derived from Syrian models but revealing at the same time a Hittite scribal background (e.g., the Akkadian našûm as a calque of the Hittite šara da- in the grant formula).30 The LSU are the first datable documents that provide the names of individual scribes, who are all conspicuously Anatolian.31 This indicates that by the time of Telipinu an independent, local scribal expertise had developed within the Hittite administration. Interestingly, unlike all its predecessors, the grant issued by Arnuwanda I and Ašmunikkal is written in Hittite, complete with sentence-initial conjunctions and particles (e.g., n(u)=ašta), finite verbal forms (e.g., anda paizzi) and nominative endings for personal names (e.g., fZidanduš; mAparkammiš). The standard formulas, however, are still maintained in Akkadian in this latest land grant.
After the reign of Telipinu we reenter a dark age that is sometimes called the Middle Kingdom. As argued above (Chapter 5), this definition is now generally considered inappropriate for a historical evaluation. It is nonetheless true that there are very few records except the LSU securely attributed to this period until the reign of Tuthaliya I. Tahurwaili and Zidanta II issued two treaties with Kizzuwatna, unfortunately quite fragmentary, involving their respective counterparts, Eheya and Pilliya. Judging from preserved sections, the treaty between Tahurwaili and Eheya (CTH 29), known only from Akkadian manuscripts, was a paritetic treaty modeled upon the one drawn between Telipinu and Išputahšu.32 A treaty between Zidanta II and Pilliya (CTH 25), found in Hittite only, has the general appearance of a paritetic treaty but also includes the clause našta lingain šarratti (obv. 12, ‘you, i.e., Pilliya, are transgressing the oath’), which is normally used to refer to client rulers in subordination treaties.33 The fragmentary treaty of an unknown Hittite king with Paddatiššu of Kizzuwatna (CTH 26), preserved in an Akkadian manuscript, almost certainly belongs to the same period.34 It is a paritetic treaty similar to those of Telipinu and Tahurwaili, which suggests that it must predate the era when Kizzuwatna was subordinate to Hatti (the reign of Tuthaliya I and thereafter).
This is the situation of early Hittite literacy as considered from original texts and texts known from later copies but datable to the Old Kingdom by their authorship or historical association (Hittite scribes never employed a system for dating the texts they redacted). Given that most of the Hittite archives were used for long periods—often even for the entire length of Hittite history—tablet findspots, even if well documented, are not very useful as dating criteria. Therefore, students of Hittite philology since the infancy of the discipline have tried to develop independent paleographic methods to sort out the chronological distribution of Hittite manuscripts. A tripartite system of Old, Middle, and New Script, based on observable diachronic changes in sign shapes and ductus, was thus devised and covers the entire span of Hittite history. As defined in this system, Old Script was used roughly between the reigns of Hattušili I and Telipinu, Middle Script from the reigns of Telipinu to Šuppiluliuma I, and New Script thereafter until the end of the 13th century.35
This tripartition based on paleography laid down the premises for the development of a parallel system that focused on stages of the Hittite language and was formulated accordingly as Old, Middle, and New Hittite.36 The starting point for this effort was the identification of a supposed original of the reign of Hattušili I that was written in Hittite, the Zukraši text (KBo 7.14+). Its discovery encouraged the belief that the Hittite language had been written down since the founding of the Hittite kingdom.37
It turned out that this straightforward reconstruction was far too optimistic. Recent research has questioned a rigid application of the tripartite system, especially as regards the chronology of the Old Script and its boundaries with the Middle Script phase. Miller (2004a:463–464, fn. 733) argued that the earlier phase lasted until the reign of Tuthaliya I, which raised the suspicion that many texts formerly classified as Old Script were written in the 15th century BCE, that is, during what was considered the Middle Script phase. This might well be true of the Zukraši text, whose sign shapes are closer to those of the Middle Script.38 Paleographic evidence from the LSU, now firmly dated to the 15th century BCE, further corroborates the existence of several Old Script features during the Middle Script period.39 Finally, the significant divergence in ductus and sign shapes between the Tikunani letter or Uršu text and other Old Script documents suggests that the evolution of Hittite cuneiform during its early stages was far more complex than the linear development suggested by the tripartite paleographic system.
On these premises, and considering that all ascertained originals up to the late 15th century BCE are written in Akkadian, Popko (2007) and van den Hout (2009) advanced the view that Hittite became a scribal language no earlier than the reign of Telipinu. According to this theory, the Palace Chronicle, the Tale of Zalp(uw)a, and Old Hittite texts with historical narratives such as the Anitta text and the deeds of Old Hittite kings would be considered translations from Akkadian. Given the lack of Akkadian versions, however, this hypothesis remains highly speculative and can hardly be accepted. In his 2020 monograph, van den Hout argued instead that monolingual Old Hittite texts could have been transmitted orally for more than two centuries before being transcribed during the reign of Telipinu or later. In a broader comparative perspective, van den Hout makes a case for a slow Hittite adaptation to cuneiform, which involved a long phase when this script was used seldom and only in the language from which it was first introduced, namely, Akkadian.
Notwithstanding van den Hout’s numerous thought-provoking insights, his arguments are mostly circumstantial and hardly conclusive. To be sure, orality was an important and perhaps even the prevalent medium for the propagation of literary traditions in all proto-literate societies, and LBA Anatolia Hittite was no exception. The Tale of Zalp(uw)a, Palace Chronicle, and Puhanu Chronicle were all well suited to public declamation, but lengthy, non-recitative texts such as the deeds of Old Hittite kings or the Anitta Text were less so.40 The final banquet scene in the Palace Chronicle provides a context in which this text, or parts of it, could have been recited aloud as a form of entertainment.41 However, this does not rule out the possibility that the anecdotes making up the composition could have circulated in writing as aides-mémoire; the same might be true for the other compositions as well.42 As Rieken argues (2000), the Tale of Zalp(uw)a and the Palace Chronicle preserve traces of an archaic linguistic layer that perhaps dated to Hattušili I’s time. This kind of conservativism is normal in poetic texts, in which meter, musicality, or other stylistic considerations constrain linguistic choices, but would not be typical of prosaic folk tales and historical accounts circulated in a purely aural environment.
There is also no reason to assume a long phase of adaptation of cuneiform to the Hittite language. Numerous Hittiticisms or Hittite expressions, including a short sentence, are already present in the Uršu text. Whether the scribe was a Hittite native speaker, as argued by Beckman (1995a:27), or Syrian, as proposed here (see Chapter 8, § 3.1),43 the Uršu text would prove that the process of adapting cuneiform to Hittite was in progress by the time of Hattušili I. Nothing would prevent this sort of experimentation from continuing and reaching a mature stage in a matter of decades. As Archi (2010:43) and de Martino (2021:114) note, the full development of cuneiform writing in a local vernacular could take less than a generation, as proven by the cases of the Eblaite and Urartian cuneiforms.
Whether or not Old Hittite texts in Akkadian were later translations of Hittite versions is still the subject of heated debate. For most texts, the choice of Akkadian was reasonable. The Tikunani letter and the treaties with Kizzuwatna were diplomatic documents involving or addressed to non-Hittite partners and thus used Akkadian as an interregional lingua franca, as customary in the Near East during the second millennium BCE. The scribes of the Annals and Testament of Hattušili I might have resorted to the prestige of Akkadian to best convey the king’s word. For the same reason, an Akkadian version was also drafted for the Edict of Telipinu at the end of the following century, at a point when even van den Hout believes that Hittite was written. The LSU do not provide definitive proof that Akkadian was the official scribal language of the Old Hittite court. The Akkadian formulas making up discursive parts of these texts hardly originated from Anatolia as they are earlier attested only at Alalah VII, in a single instance and with a small variation.44 Other examples, however, might have circulated at sites where the second-millennium occupation has yet to be investigated. A likely candidate in this respect might be Aleppo, to which Alalah VII was subordinate.45
The Akkadian of the Uršu Text is easily explained if its scribe was Syrian or trained in a Syrian scribal school, as the script would suggest. Finally, the use of Akkadian for inscribed objects is not a valid argument for the primacy of Akkadian over Hittite during the Old Kingdom: would one deny that Hittite was the official scribal language in Hattuša during the Empire period because of the Akkadian inscriptions on Tuthaliya I’s sword and the cuneiform legends on royal seals?
Relevant to the question of Hittite literacy are discussions around the Old Hittite redactional phases of the Hittite Laws. This is an imposing legal corpus organized in two series (Series I–II) of 100 paragraphs each, named in the respective colophons ‘if a man’ (takku LÚ-aš; CTH 291) and ‘if a vine’ (takku GIŠGEŠTIN-aš; CTH 292).46 Each paragraph summarizes the case law on a type of case, such as the murder of merchants, abduction, theft, land tenure, lost property, or damage to animals, plants, or implements. The language is Hittite and, notwithstanding the conditional structure, which closely recalls Mesopotamian legal codes, there is no reason to postulate that the laws derived from a lost Akkadian archetype. The Hittite Laws are the most copied product of Hittite scribal culture: each series is preserved in more than twenty manuscripts, and these are dated paleographically and linguistically from OH to NH. Those who have edited the documents agree that the most ancient copies are manuscripts A (KBo 22.62+) and M (KBo 19.2+) in Series I and manuscript aa (KBo 25.85+) in Series II.
Most of the manuscripts are de facto identical, with later variants modernizing the language of more ancient copies. However, a stratification of different versions of individual dispositions is already testified in the OH manuscripts by references to earlier stages (karū, ‘formerly’), contrasted with more recent ones (kinuna; ‘now’). The process of re-elaboration of the dispositions then continued to be made up to the NH era, chiefly resulting in the replacement of corporal punishments with pecuniary fines. The last and most extensive revision, dating to the Late Empire period, is the so-called Parallel Text (KBo 6.4), which is organized in 41 sections that reformulate some of the paragraphs of Series I.
In contrast to their Mesopotamian counterpart, namely the Code of Hammurapi, the Hittite Laws are not claimed by a ruler, nor do they have a prologue or epilogue that hints at when they were written. This has generated a discussion about the dating and attribution of the text. Like the Tale of Zalp(uw)a and the Palace Chronicle, the Laws refer to the ‘father of the king’ (ABI LUGAL), in relation to a karū clause reported in §§ 54 to 56. Identifying this personage as Hattušili I, several commentators have ascribed the most ancient corpus (not directly attested but reflected by the karū clauses) to him and assigned to Muršili I the kinuna redaction preserved in the actual OH manuscripts.47 Hoffner (1997:230), instead, argued that Telipinu authored the kinuna redaction.48
Even though neither proposal can be confirmed conclusively, the later rather than the earlier dating of the kinuna stage of the laws seems more convincing. A reformation of the law collection would be more consonant with the process of rationalization and internal reorganization of the kingdom claimed by Telipinu in the normative and administrative sections of his edict. Hoffner (apud Roth 1995:215) observed that the edict included two legal statements, regarding premeditated homicide and sorcery, respectively, that seem to complement the legal spectrum covered by the laws.49 At this juncture, one may also consider § 47 of the laws, which concerns the fiscal regulations applied to lands assigned by royal grant. This passage and the terminology employed therein—for example, the use of the word ‘gift’ (NÍG.BA) in reference to such grants—closely recall the formulas employed in the LSU, thus reflecting a practice of land management that, as detailed above, is not attested before Telipinu or his immediate predecessors. In general, archaeological records agree that the age of Telipinu (the mid- to late 16th century) was characterized by major transformations in the Hittite social landscapes. This might be broadly compatible with attempts at legislative rationalization.
The question of when the karū dispositions were redacted remains. As pointed out by Dardano (1997:8–11), the words ‘father of the king’ that are associated with the karū version might be a rhetorical device evoking an indefinite remote past rather than a reference to a specific ruler.50 In line with his hypothesis about the beginning of Hittite literacy, van den Hout (2020:92–94) proposed that the karū laws had been transmitted orally since the time of Labarna, perhaps as exempla that resembled the anecdotes of the Palace Chronicle, and then were collected and revisited in a single corpus under Telipinu. This might be a reasonable interpretation as it is common for law codifications to be preceded by a ‘prehistory’ of customary or traditional law transmitted across generations. However, the karū laws could have circulated in a written form as well, perhaps individually embedded in royal edicts or other normative documents that eventually did not survive. This might explain why they needed to be explicitly superseded by the kinuna version when the final law collection was drawn.
After the Old Hittite stage, the Hittite scribal practice remained relatively stable, even during the pre-imperial phase, when the Hittites were subject to renewed influence from the Syro-Mesopotamian and Hurrian spheres. At this stage, roughly corresponding to what was once called the Middle Hittite age, Hittite relationships, first with Kizzuwatna and then with the influential Mittanian kingdom, coincided with a transformation of the Mesopotamian culture in Hatti. This had literary consequences—the introduction of Hurrian and Mesopotamian literary works51—and possibly affected how the Akkadian language was used. Innovations emerged in the paleography of the writing system: some texts show a Middle Babylonian, Assyrian, or Mittanian ductus. This phenomenon, which was probably connected with the slightly later development of the Late New Script (LNS, or Type IIIc) ductus, had little or no impact on the functional structure of the syllabary and, while conducive to the identification of intensive contacts, generally influenced only the shape of the glyphs.52
3 Cuneiform Archives of Anatolia and the Relevant Neighboring Areas
By the end of the Old Hittite stage, Hatti was projecting an increasing political influence beyond the boundaries of Anatolia. Therefore, during the Late Bronze Age, archives connected with the Hittite world were also found outside the kingdom. Having described Anatolia in its ancient Near Eastern context at the time of the introduction of cuneiform, we will consider the Hattian context during the later stages of the historical phase discussed in this volume by presenting the relevant archives.
In archival studies, a distinction is usually made between two types of document collections: archives and libraries. An archive is generally understood as a spontaneous collection of documents that has accumulated progressively and represents the direct product of the practical activity of an institution. Therefore, one expects an archive to house mainly administrative documents that are related to the bureaucratic activities of a given institution. Over time, documents that are no longer relevant may be either discarded or kept in the archive; if they are retained, the collection becomes a historical archive. Conversely, a library is a deliberate collection of documents that was formed for cultural purposes and does not reflect the administrative activities of an institution. Literature is what we prototypically expect to find in such a collection.
When turning to the tablet collections of the ancient Near East, the distinction between an archive and a library is often blurred. Even when we can reconstruct with relative certainty the documents originally held in a given repository—which is by no means always the case—their nature is not always consistent with what we expect to find in either type of collection. Most of the time, it is hardly possible to discern anything but a general trend toward one or the other type; the reason for this may simply be that modern categories are not always applicable to ancient realities.53 Therefore, in the following, we will mostly refer generically to ‘tablet collections,’ making cautious use of the terms ‘archive’ and ‘library.’ A thorough investigation of each tablet collection—which is outside the scope of our work—would be necessary to establish whether these terms, in their modern meanings, would be appropriate to describe a given collection.
3.1 Anatolian Archives
The majority of the Hittite texts have been found in the buildings of the Hittite capital city, Hattuša (corresponding to the modern village of Boğazköy), where excavations began in 1906 under the direction of the German Assyriologist Hugo Winckler. The main areas where texts have been found were in the Lower City, the oldest part of the capital, although some findspots were in the Upper City (Fig. 6.1). The three major findspots of the Lower City were the citadel of Büyükkale, the storerooms surrounding Temple I, and the House on the Slope.
Figure 6.1
Plan of Boğazköy-Hattuša with distribution of the main cuneiform archives
copyright Archive of the Boğazköy Expedition, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Berlin
Several tablet collections were identified in the citadel (Fig. 6.2). The largest, in Building A, included texts belonging to all of the genres that we could term literary. Economic documents and other archival materials, as well as ephemeral documents like oracle reports, were scarcely represented, supporting the interpretation of this building as a palace library.54 Other findspots on the citadel included Building E, whose function was either residential or cultic, but which also contained an archive of tablets;55 Building K, which had a small collection of mostly religious texts; Building D, where several Middle Hittite Landschenkungsurkunden and sealed bullae were found; and building complex B-C-H, which seemed to be a library but also may have included a scribal school related to the nearby Building A.56
In the Lower City as well were the storerooms surrounding Temple I, which contained documents belonging to all textual genres, including most of the few economic records we have. The third major findspot in the Lower City, the House on the Slope (Haus am Hang), was located on the slope leading to the citadelof Büyükkale, which probably also included a scribal school and was in a close connection with the Temple I.57
In the Upper City, some temples (8, 12, 15, 16, and 26) contained tablet collections, including texts belonging to almost all documentary genres and mostly dating to the Old and Middle Hittite periods. The archive of Nişantepe in the Upper City is also worth mentioning because thousands of sealed bullae of the Empire period and several Middle Hittite land grants were found there.
Outside Boğazköy/Hattuša, more or less considerable collections of Hittite tablets have been found at Maşat Höyük/Tapikka, Ortaköy/Šapinuwa, Kuşaklı/Šarišša, and Kayalıpınar/Šamuha (Fig. 6.3).
Figure 6.2
The citadel of Büyükkale and its main archives
At Maşat Höyük, corresponding to the ancient city of Tapikka, more than 100 tablets were found from 1973 to 1984.58 All of the tablets except one date to the 14th century BCE, and most are letters exchanged between the Hittite king and the officials residing in Tapikka. A smaller collection of texts, consisting of rituals, oracles, cult inventories, and two letters, was found at Kuşaklı, the ancient city of Šarišša, which has been under excavation since 1992. Texts found in Building A date to the 13th century BCE and have been published by Wilhelm (1997b). A few other tablets, mostly dated to the Middle Hittite period, have been found in Building C and on the top of the acropolis, in the remnants of Building D.59
Figure 6.3
Hittite cuneiform archives and tablet findspots across the Hittite domain, with attested languages
In Ortaköy (ancient Šapinuwa), excavations that began in 1990 have brought to light a large number of tablets bearing documents belonging to different textual genres. Among them are more than 600 texts in the Hurrian language, many dating to the reign of Tuthaliya III, who resided in Šapinuwa. Unfortunately, most of the tablets are still unpublished.
More recently, a significant archive of cuneiform tablets has been unearthed at Kayalıpınar, which is been under excavation since 1999 and was recently identified with the Hittite city of Šamuha. One hundred fragments were published in DAAM 1 in 2019, including festivals, oracular inquiries, cult inventories, and a couple of letters. Quite remarkable is a small collection of seven Middle Hittite tablets in the Hurrian language, which should probably be dated to the time of Tuthaliya III. These include a fragment of the Hurrian version of the Song of Silver and an account of military campaigns in Kizzuwatna and northern Syria.60
Sporadic findings of Hittite tablets have occurred at different sites of Anatolia, although no extensive archives have been found. Six fragmentary tablets were found at Uşaklı Höyük, perhaps to be identified with the ancient Zippalanda, including a mythological text perhaps related to the Kumarbi cycle, a fragment of the AN.TAH.ŠUM festival, a MS oracular document, and three letters; a festival fragment and a letter were found at Alaca Höyük, which may correspond to the ancient city of Arinna; two Middle Hittite letters and a historical fragment were located in Büklükale; and a Landschenkungsurkunde and a bulla with the seal of queen Puduheba were discovered at Tarsus in Cilicia.
Besides cuneiform tablets, Anatolian hieroglyphic documentation exists for the second millennium BCE, including two major typologies of inscriptions: 1) sealing impressions on bullae and cuneiform tablets that contain personal names and titles, sometimes accompanied by a cuneiform legend; and 2) more or less extensive monumental inscriptions, dating to the Empire age, which are written in a variety of Luwian that was spoken in the court of Hattuša (known as Empire Luwian or Hattuša Luwian; cf. Chapter 11, § 1.2).61 Since the second-millennium hieroglyphic corpus is not particularly relevant for language contact, Hieroglyphic Luwian will be dealt with in Volume 2.
3.2 Peripheral Archives
Several documents relevant to the history and cultures of ancient Anatolia, written in Hittite and other languages (Akkadian and Hurrian above all), have been found in archives peripheral to the core of the Hittite world, especially in Amarna, Alalah, Ugarit, and Emar (Fig. 6.3). In 1887, approximately 300 cuneiform tablets were found amid the ruins of the city of Amarna, the ancient Akhetaten, which was founded by Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten and served as the capital of Egypt from 1347 to 1332 BCE. The textual corpus mostly consists of diplomatic letters exchanged between the Egyptian pharaohs and the kings of the great Mesopotamian, Syrian, and Anatolian polities, as well as Egyptian vassals in Syria and Palestine. Almost all texts are in Akkadian, although some include Hurrian and West Semitic glosses. The few exceptions include two letters in Hittite: EA 32, sent by the king of Arzawa to the pharaoh,62 and EA 31, sent by Amenhotep III to Tarhuntaradu of Arzawa, as well as the so-called Mittani letter in Hurrian, which was sent by King Tušratta (EA 24) and until recently was the only text in Hurrian confirmed to come from the kingdom of Mittani.63
Excavations by Sir Leonard Woolley between 1937 and 1949 in the site of Tell Açana, corresponding to ancient Alalah, the capital city of the kingdom of Mukiš in northern Syria, have unearthed more than 450 cuneiform tablets written in the local Akkadian dialect and one Hittite oracular inquiry. The texts belong to two different stratigraphic levels: Alalah VII, dated to the 18th to 17th century BCE, and Alalah IV, dated to the 15th century BCE.64 Alalah is crucial to Hittite studies, especially because, as previously discussed and recently shown by van den Hout (2012), the cuneiform script in use at Alalah VII was probably the closest paleographic variant of Hittite cuneiform script, and the chronology of Alalah level VII, whose destruction seems to have coincided with the Syrian military campaigns of Hattušili I, makes it likely that this cuneiform syllabary was the direct source of Hittite cuneiform. Furthermore, Alalah texts are important for the history of the Hurrians, because many Hurrian words and personal names occur in texts from level VII, attesting to an earlier and substantial penetration of Hurrians in the area.65
In 1929 French excavations began at Ras Šamra, corresponding to the ancient city of Ugarit, where thousands of cuneiform tablets were discovered in several findspots, including not only the archives of the Royal Palace but also private buildings that belonged to officials and prominent participants in the cultural life of the city.66 Other texts have been found at the neighboring site of Ras Ibn Hani. The texts generally date to the 13th century BCE, and many different languages are attested: Ugaritic (both in standard cuneiform and the local alphabetic cuneiform script), Akkadian, Hurrian (also in alphabetic cuneiform), and Hittite.67 Furthermore, a few Egyptian, Cypro-Minoan, and Luwian hieroglyphic texts have been found.
Excavations directed by J.C. Magueron at Meskene between 1972 and 1976 allowed the identification of the site with the ancient city of Emar, the capital of the land of Aštata, which in the 13th century was under the control of the Hittite viceroy of Karkemiš. A large library, including hundreds of cuneiform tablets belonging to several textual genres and written in Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite, and Hurrian, was found in Temple M1. Smaller tablet collections were found in other temple buildings, and a number of mostly legal and administrative documents were discovered in three private archives.68 Occasional findings have been made at other peripheral sites. For example, Tell Afis in Syria has yielded nine tablet fragments, including three Hittite letters, three administrative documents (an inventory and two lists of people), and three fragments in Akkadian.69
4 Concluding Remarks
The diffusion of cuneiform to Anatolia occurred in waves. The first, which occurred during the Old Assyria phase of the Middle Bronze Age, played a very limited role in the future development of Hittite literacy, which can be characterized in general as a Late Bronze Age phenomenon. Beginning in the 16th century BCE, and increasingly over the following three centuries, Anatolia was one of the most important peripheral areas to fully adopt the koiné of the cuneiform world. By the final Bronze Age (late 14th and 13th century BCE), the Hittite scribal culture even began to influence extra-Anatolian archives, to which reference will be made in the core chapters of this volume.
We do not use this label to refer to a language, nor to a specific tradition within the family of the cuneiform scripts (as done, e.g., by Salvini 2014:308–309). We intend koiné in its widest meaning, as it is used already in Giusfredi and Pisaniello 2019a and Giusfredi 2020d (‘koinè cuneiforme’).
During the Neobabylonian and Achaemenid dynasties, cuneiform still existed and one version of it was employed for writing Old Persian. However, its features, functions, and the very role of the Mesopotamian cultural model had changed significantly during the transition from an Akkadian-centered to a Persian-centered world that would survive at least until the arrival of Islam despite the addition of Greek components during the Macedonian and Roman eras.
Cuneiform was used and known in Egypt as shown by the Amarna archive. Furthermore, permeability to the Ancient Near Eastern cultural environment is equally evident in the introduction of Semitic divine figures, roughly during the age of the XIV and XV dynasties. Still, no evidence exists that cuneiform ever became a dominant code in the Nile kingdom or that it became part of the standard scribal formation.
The concepts of graphemics and paleography are sometimes confused in the literature. Graphemics is the study of the functional aspect of the graphic sign (its value and the way it is combined with other signs in a writing system). It is, therefore, a structural concept (Beccaria 2004:369). Paleography, on the other hand, is the analysis of the formal aspect of the glyphs: either their synchronic variation or diachronic change. Graphemic change can occur in conditions of paleographic stability, and paleographic change can occur without alterations in the traditional shapes of the signs.
The Hattuša tablets preserving the Akkadian, Hittite, and Hurrian versions of the epic of Gilgameš correspond to CTH 341. A recent edition is offered by Beckman 2019b.
Published in Hrůša 2010.
This derivation is testified by the use of specific signs for rendering specific types of stops, sibilants, glides, and vowels. The orthography of Old Babylonian in southern Mesopotamia became standardized at some point during the 19th century BCE after undergoing changes that are not found in the northern and peripheral graphemic inventories. For an overview on the historical phonology of Akkadian, see Sommerfeld 2021. For details on the complex issue of the notation of Semitic sibilants, see also the seminal work by Goetze 1958.
See above, Chapter 4, for further discussion on the Old Assyrian age in Anatolia.
On the sociolinguistics of Akkadian in the Old Hittite phase, see Chapter 8.
For an overview of the history of the studies, cf. van den Hout 2009c.
Giorgieri 2000a:181.
Beside supporting the view that Hittite cuneiform belonged to a peripheral tradition derived from the Old Akkadian system, Gamkrelidze (2008) proposed to identify in Nuzi cuneiform a possible candidate for the transmission to Anatolia. This theory that cannot be excluded but is not strongly supported by the available evidence and does not appear particulary promising from a historical perspective. For general criticism about the involvement of Hurrian in the development of the Hittite cuneiform system, see also Jäntti 2017.
The relationship between the cuneiform traditions of Hattuša and Alalah VII has been thoroughly addressed by van den Hout in various articles (e.g., 2012) and is summarized in his 2020 monograph (pp. 38–56).
Devecchi 2005:28–29, 113–127.
Edited by Salvini 1994.
Showing a chemical signature from the Middle Euphrates area. See Goren et al. 2011.
Archi 2010:40.
But cf. some succinct references to ‘clearly stacked tablets’ in reports on the earliest excavations (van den Hout 2020:266–268).
De Martino 2003:21–79; Devecchi 2005; Klinger 2005.
De Martino and Imparati 1998:392–395; de Martino 2003, nos. 3–5.
Dardano 1997.
Gilan 2015:295–325.
Güterbock 1938:105–113. For the interpretation and definition of the historico-didactic genre in Old Hittite literature, see Gilan 2015.
KUB 26.74 (NS); KBo 3.57 (NS); KUB 31.64+ (as per Soysal 1989). See de Martino 2003, nos. 6–7.
KUB 26.71 and duplicates, KUB 36.98 and KBo 3.59.
Salvini 1993.
Hoffmann 1984.
Only tiny fragments of the Hittite version are extant. The Akkadian version, slightly better preserved, was edited by Del Monte 1981:210–212.
Riemschneider 1958; Rüster and Wilhelm 2012. The hypothesis of an LSU tradition stretching back to Hattušili I, first proposed by Balkan 1973, has since been discarded on sound prosopographical grounds; see Ruster and Wilhelm 2012:49–52.
Archi 2010:39. Against the Syrian origin of the model, see van den Hout 2020:64.
Van den Hout 2009a:81–84.
Del Monte 1981:209; Devecchi 2015:66. This text is only partially edited by Del Monte (1981:210–213), but a complete translation (in Italian) is elaborated by Devecchi (2015:65–68).
Editions: Otten 1951; Wilhelm 2014a.
Editions: Meyer 1953:112–119; Wilhelm 2014b.
Neu 1980, XIII–XXII; Starke 1985:21–27. For recent syntheses on the state of the art of Hittite textual dating, see van den Hout 2009b; Weeden 2011:42–52; de Martino 2021; Klinger 2022.
Heinhold-Krahmer et al. 1979.
Otten and Souček 1969:42.
Popko 2007:578; Weeden 2011:47. Archi (2010:38) stresses similarities with the treaty between Zidanta II and Pilliya (see above). However, the findspot of the Zukraši Text in level IVc of Büyükkale, adduced by Otten and Souček (1969:42) as the main argument for its early dating, can at best provide a terminus ante quem in the late 16th century.
Wilhelm 2005; Rüster and Wilhelm 2012.
Archi 2010:42.
Gilan 2015:132–133.
In this regard, van den Hout (2020:85–86) cogently stresses the brachylogic style of the Palace Chronicle, which seemingly was meant to be enriched by a knowledgeable reader during a public recitation.
See also Archi 2010:40 (Syrian or trained in a Syrian scribal school).
See van den Hout 2020:61, 64.
On this issue, van den Hout’s reasoning was contradictory: he acknowledged the striking similarities between the Hittite LSU and the Alalah document to confirm the Syrian origin of Hittite cuneiform but dismissed the comparison as an argument for the Syrian origin of the LSU model.
Main edition: Friedrich 1959; Imparati 1964; Hoffner 1997.
Carruba 1962; Archi 1968. This dating would also accord with the references in the above mentioned kāru clause in § 54 to some towns (Tamalkiya, Hatra, Zalpa, Tašhiniya, etc.) that figure prominently in texts attributed to Hattušili I or Muršili I and are either not attested or really attested in later records; see Collins 1987 and Singer 2001.
For a dating of the OH Laws to the reign of to Telipinu, see also Imparati 1964:5–8.
For a similar observation, see Korošec 1963:130.
See also van den Hout 2020:87.
For an overview of the Hurrian literary texts, which were usually designated SÌR in the Hittite tablets, see Chapter 10. For the presence of Mesopotamian literature and Mesopotamian scribes in Hatti, cf. Beckman 1983, who demonstrated that some of the materials were introduced to Hatti by Mittanian intermediation, but others were probably directly imported from Mesopotamia. See also Chapter 7 for the Sumerian texts from Hatti and Chapter 8 for the Akkadian texts.
For a rich discussion of the state of the art of Late Hittite paleography and the questions that remain to be answered, cf. Weeden 2016, with references to previous literature.
On this topic, cf. especially Francia 2015a, including the references.
Cf. Košak 1995.
Cf. Alaura 1998; Alaura 2015.
Cf. Francia 2015b; Pisaniello 2015a.
Cf. Torri 2008.
The tablets from Maşat Höyük have been published by Alp 1991.
Cf. Wilhelm 1998; Wilhelm 2002.
Cf. Wilhelm 2019.
See Hawkins 2003:139–145. This is valid for longer inscriptions such as SÜDBURG, NİŞANTAŞ, EMİRGAZI, and YALBURT, as well as some of the shorter ones (e.g., FIRAKTIN and ALEPPO 1), that include phonetic complements. Other inscriptions (e.g., BOĞAZKÖY 1 and 2) are fully logographically written and could be read in any language. Hieroglyphic legends identifying divine figures at YAZILIKAYA are in Hurrian (also note the phrase tisupi hubiti ‘calf of Teššub’). The small group of hieroglyphic inscriptions from western Anatolia may belong to a different writing tradition than that of Hattuša (see Oreshko 2013).
The letter includes a post-scriptum by the scribe, who asks to his Egyptian colleague to always write him in Hittite. On the basis of the Arzawa letters, Knudtzon 1902 was the first to suggest that Hittite was an Indo-European language.
The standard edition of the Amarna tablets is that by Knudtzon 1907). A more recent comprehensive analysis of the letters can be found in Liverani 1998b and 1999.
Alalah texts have been published by Wiseman 1953.
For an extensive treatment of this topic, cf. Draffkorn 1959.
On the private archives of Ugarit, cf. del Olmo Lete 2018.
Texts from the Royal Palace were published in the series PRU; for the alphabetic texts, cf. KTU3. On Hurrian texts, see also Giorgieri 2013.
Emar texts in Sumerian and Akkadian are published in Arnaud 1985–1987; six Hittite tablets in Salvini and Trémouille 2003, and Hurrian tablets in Salvini 2015.
Cf. Archi and Venturi 2012.