Stanley Lombardo

Gary M. Beckman

Gilgamesh

Among the rituals kept in the archives of the Hittite capital, more than twenty are concerned with birth and its difficulties. This work transliterates and translates these texts, and provides them with a commentary discussing anthropological as well as philological questions. An introduction sketches the treatment of birth in Hittite texts of various genra, while a summary outlines Hittite "obstetrical" practice as it may be reconstructed from all available cuneiform sources. One chapter is devoted to the character and the role of the human personnel and divinities attendant at birth, and particular attention is given to the vexin problem of the DINGIR.MAH (MEs/HI.A). A glossary of the vocabulary appearing in the Hittite birth rituals is included.

Hittite Birth Rituals

Eric H. Cline

Trevor Bryce

This volume offers, for the first time in a single source, English translations of all twenty-six fifteenth–thirteenth centuries B.C.E. Ahhiyawa texts, a commentary and brief exposition on each text’s historical implications, an introductory essay, and a longer essay on Mycenaean-Hittite interconnections.

The Ahhiyawa Texts

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.

The Hittite Gilgamesh

Harry A. Hoffner

This is the first book-length collection in English of letters from the ancient kingdom of the Hittites. All known well-preserved examples, including the important corpus of letters from the provincial capital of Tapikka, are reproduced here in romanized transcription and English translation, accompanied by introductory essays, explanatory notes on the text and its translation, and a complete description of the rules of Hittite correspondence compared with that of other ancient Middle Eastern states. Letters containing correspondence between kings and their foreign peers, between kings and their officials in the provinces, and between these officials themselves reveal rich details of provincial administration, the relationships and duties of the officials, and tantalizing glimpses of their private lives. Matters discussed include oversight of agriculture, tax liabilities, litigation, inheritance rights, defense against hostile groups on the kingdom's periphery, and consulting the gods by means of oracular procedures.

Letters from the Hittite Kingdom

Jack M. Sasson

John Baines

Karen Sydney Rubinson

Consists of articles organized in eleven parts: the ancient Near East in Western thought; the environment; population; social institutions; history and culture; economy and trade; technology and artistic production; religion and science; language, writing, and literature; visual and performing arts; and retrospective essays.

Civilizations of the Ancient Near East

This work contains the first English translations of a collection of Hittite myths. The translations are based on the original tablets on which the myths were written, and take into account recent textual discoveries and published studies on the texts. Revised and augmented, this second edition includes additional introductions to each myth and a newly published Hurrian myth, "The Song of Release," dealing with legal and social institutions in ancient Babylonia and Israel. Accessible to nonspecialists, the translations also preserve column and line count for the convenience of scholars.

Gary M. Beckman

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