HFR Team

Introduction | CTH Numbers in the HFR Basic Corpus

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Introduction to the Basic Corpus

The HFR Basic Corpus offers transliterations of all fragments identified as festival ritual texts. From the list of CTH numbers in the HFR Basic Corpus, one can access the individual texts by clicking on the respective publication or inventory number. Alternatively, the text publication number or the inventory number (only for unpublished texts or texts published solely under the inventory number) of a text belonging to the festival ritual corpus can be called up via the direct search (see above). Texts are to be entered according to the specifications and abbreviations of the concordance.

The basis of the transliterations, which were produced according to the conventions valid in Hittitology, are predominantly the autographs of Hittite texts from Boğazköy as well as published tablets and fragments from other sites or private collections. Publications of new finds were also incorporated. In addition to the autographs, the resources (excavation transcriptions, transliterations, photo collection) of the Hethitologie-Archiv of the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur | Mainz were used for the production of the transcriptions.

Regular research visits by members of the HFR team, especially to the Anadolu Medeniyetleri Müzesi (Ankara) and the Arkeoloji Müzeleri (Istanbul), served to confirm and document fragment assemblages, to clarify detailed epigraphic questions, to survey physical characteristics of manuscripts, and to digitally record fragments (in the form of photographs as well as, in part, 3D scans).

All transliterations were initially made by a research assistant of the project or, if already available, matched with the autography, collated if possible on the basis of photographs, and then checked by another research assistant according to the 4-eyes principle. Since the base corpus as a whole is built on the research efforts of the excavation philologists and the authors of the autograph volumes, they are provided by the project as a whole without author information. A revision history in list form lists the responsible editors within the project in the following manner:

• transliteration created/accepted by N.N. (date);
• overall correction and photo collation by N.N. (date);
• if applicable, collation of the tablet by N.N. (date);
• second overall correction by N.N. (date);zweite Gesamtkorrektur von N.N. (Datum);
• correction of individual passages of text by N.N. (date).

A detailed description of the transliteration conventions can be found in the basic corpus protocol. Here, only the most important points are mentioned briefly:

• Hittite is written in lower case and italics, other phonetically written languages (e.g. Hattic, Luwic, Hurrian) are written in lower case and not in italics.
• Sumerograms are capitalized, Akkadograms are capitalized and italicized, determinatives are superscript.
• Line and column references generally follow the autographs (obligatory deviations are marked with “!”).
• In joins, the numbers at the beginning of the line refer to the individual fragments that follow; the order of column and line references separated by “/” corresponds to the order of the fragments mentioned at the beginning of the line.
• Unsure character interpretation/reading is marked with superscript question mark (“^?”). In case of several uncertain characters in a row, a question mark in brackets (“^(?)”) is used.
• The emendation of a character is indicated with superscript exclamation mark (“^!”).

A complete lexical and morphological annotation is attached to the transliterations of the texts of the base corpus. It was created automatically and has already been manually pre-validated for numerous manuscripts.

In texts with only automatic annotation, all potential analyses are displayed by the “mouseover” function above the word, although in most cases only one or a few analyses are possible in context. In texts whose annotation has already been manually pre-validated, the lines with the glossing can also be displayed interlinearly in each case directly below the transliteration. Texts with pre-validated annotation are also indexed by glossaries.

The setting of footnotes was handled restrictively, e.g. if the HFR conventions make this necessary or if a text reconstruction requires an explanation by duplicate or parallel texts, by scientific studies and in individual cases also for philological questions. The latter, however, is the exception in the basic corpus, since detailed philological, linguistic, and textual commentaries are reserved for the critical editions.

Transcriptions provided

The following external colleagues have produced transliterations of cuneiform editions and made them available to the project for further processing in digital format:

• Rukiye Akdoğan (ABoT 2, DBH 46)
• Metin Alparslan (UBT)
• Carlo Corti (KBo 66)
• Francesco Fuscagni (KBo 64.1–205)
• Detlev Groddek (IBoT 4, KBo 22, 30, 35, 39, 44–50, 54, 57–59; KUB 51, 55, 58–60; VS NF 12)
• Jürgen Lorenz (KBo 69, as well as numerous other individual texts)
• Sabine Melzer (KBo 60)
• Miriam Pflugmacher (KBo 65)
• Antonia Pohl (KBo 51, 55, 61–63, 64.206–405, 78, 70; KUB 38)
• Turna Somel (KBo 67)
• Oğuz Soysal (CHDS 2–3)
• Ilknur Taş (DBH 43)
• Johann Tischler (KUB 56–57)
• Giulia Torri; Francesco Barsacchi (KBo 12–13)