The outline tablets serve as the primary source of our knowledge about the nuntarriyašḫa- festival. They offer a concise summary of the entire proceedings, structured into well-organized chapters, each describing a single day of the festival. This enables us to reconstruct the festival’s general progression, even when detailed descriptions of its individual components are missing.

Despite their highly practical nature, the outline tablets are not simple sketches, but carefully edited texts. They include an introduction and a colophon and always present the entire composition on a single tablet. Their structure follows specific organizing principles, which can be characterized as follows:

(1) Each day in each outline is assigned a specific number. This numbering, given always at the end of the paragraph, is explicitly preserved in 13 of 19 manuscripts, while the remaining are damaged in the sections where this information would be expected.

(2) No two outlines follow an identical day count. Even when two tablets describe the same celebrations on corresponding days, their content aligns only for a few paragraphs, and at some point always diverges. As a result, the same celebrations can occur on different days in different outlines. For instance, the festival for the Storm-god of Nerik (DAY 7) was held on the 7th day according to Outline.2, on the 8th day according to Outline.6, and was not celebrated at all according to Outline.1 and Outline.4.

(3) Descriptions of particular celebrations are nearly identical across outlines, even when assigned to different festival days. This consistency allows us to reconstruct individual components of the festival, regardless of their placement.

(4) While celebrations can be variously placed in different outlines, their relative position within the general course of the festival remains constant. For instance, the three-day festival of Ziparwa always follows the same sequence of events and invariably precedes the king’s journey to Ḫarranašši and Zippalanda, which, in turn, always takes place before the Festival of the Road to Nerik.

Taken together, these observations indicate that, contrary to what has been assumed in previous studies, none of the outline tablets of the nuntarriyašḫa- festival are copies of one another. Instead, each outline represents a distinct version of the festival. This suggests that each available manuscript of this group is an original composition created for a particular celebration of the festival. For the same reason, the day-tablets never state which day(s) of the festival they describe (in terms of numbers), as in various versions they could be assigned to a different day number.

As observed by Houwink ten Cate Ph.H.J. 1986a, the information from various outline tablets can be synthesized into a hypothetical ‘united’ version of the festival, with day numbers not necessarily corresponding to any single historical version. While such ‘united’ version has likely never existed, it is still a useful methodological tool for analyzing the complexities of the festival. This system was used in the previous edition of the festival in Nakamura M. 2002a. The present edition offers an updated ‘united’ version of the nuntarriyašḫa- festival, incorporating newly identified joins and previously unrecognized fragments.

For the clarity of presentation, when referring to days in the ‘united’ version of the nuntarriyašḫa- festival, the term ‘DAY’ (written in capital letters) is used.

While the outline tablets structure the nuntarriyašḫa- festival according to individual days, it is also possible to discern larger structural units within the observance. These units, which may consist of royal journeys, divine processions, or clusters of interrelated celebrations, function as coherent ritual sequences and not merely as incidental groupings of events. Their integrity as multi-day components is demonstrated by the fact that they consistently appear in their complete form across the extant versions of the festival. Examples of such celebrations include, i.a., the three-day festival of Ziparwa (DAYS 8–10), the journey of the Divine Hunting Bag (DAYS 17–20), and the three-day festival in Matilla, Arinna, and Ḫattuša (DAYS 22–24).

Addendum: in October 2025, Jürgen Lorenz identified three further outline-fragments of the nuntarriyašḫa- festival among the rediscovered EBo texts. One of them turned out to be a join to Outline.17. The other two are presented here as Outline.18 and Outline.19.

The most comprehensive investigation of the outline tablets of the nuntarriyašḫa- festival so far is Nakamura M. 2002a: 15–81, who built on the seminal works by Güterbock (Güterbock H.G. 1961d) and Houwink ten Cate (Houwink ten Cate Ph.H.J. 1988a and Houwink ten Cate Ph.H.J. 2003a). This general scheme was later picked up and expanded in Corti C. 2007a. To this list one should also add the findings of Jürgen Lorenz, which appeared directly in the Konkordanz. A reassessment of the subject is provided by Kryszeń A. 2025, ZA 115/1, 92–102.

Since Nakamura’s edition provides an exemplary overview of the literature on the subject, the present edition will focus on the history of research after 2002, unless otherwise necessary.

All outline tablets seem to have originally been two-column tablets with ca. 50 lines of text in a column.

All outline tablets show predominantly New Script, with the attested sign forms ranging from IIb to IIIb variants (Kryszeń 2025a). The clear predominance of IIIa forms suggests – given that the tablets are all original compositions and not copies – that the outlines were composed and written in the period between the reigns of Muršili II and Ḫattušili III. On the one hand, this goes in line with what has previously been suggested, namely that the nuntarriyašḫa- festival was devised by Muršili II or (less likely) Šuppiluliuma I (Haas V. 1994a: 827; Taracha P. 2009a: 140; Hutter M. 2021a: 246). On the other hand, the lack of outlines showing any IIIc forms, which would point to the reign of Tudḫaliya IV or later, stands in stark contrast with some of the day-tablets that mention the name of that king.

The detailed analysis of the handwriting of each outline tablet (apart from the newly discovered EBo fragments) conducted in Kryszeń A., StBoT 73, 125–141 (2025) showed that Outline.1, Outline.8 and Outline.11 were doubtless written by the same person, which should mean that they were produced in a relatively short period of time. Additionally, Outline.3 and Outline.17 may have been written by the same scribe, though the available evidence is insufficient to confirm this with certainty.

The outline tablets are written in a concise, even terse style. They typically employ short sentences, frequently omit the predicate, and often make use of scribal abbreviations. A defining feature of the outline tablets – both for the nuntarriyašḫa- and the AN.DAḪ.ŠUM festivals – is the word lukkatti/lukkatta (“(when) it dawns; on the next day”), which marks the beginning of the new day of the festival and serves as a formulaic temporal transition.

Among the abbreviated expressions, two stand out. The indication for organizing a long ceremony known as “the great assembly” appears either as šalli ašeššar “the great assembly (takes place)” without an explicit predicate, or as šalli ḫalziya “the great (assembly) is called.” Another frequently attested abbreviation is EZEN₄-ŠU, “his/her festival (is celebrated),” in which the pronoun seems to refer to the deity in whose honor the celebrations are performed.

Feature (4) discussed above – namely, that the relative position of individual components remains stable within the overall progression of the festival regardless of the version – offers insight into the historical development of the observance. The evidence suggests that new versions of the nuntarriyašḫa- festival were created by modifying earlier ones, rather than by designing the celebrations anew. Nevertheless, no fixed 'core' set of celebrations, universal across the versions can be identified.

The outline tablets were found at various locations in Boǧazköy. Five were recovered in Temple 1 (Outline.4, Outline.10, Outline.11, Outline.14, and Outline.15), two in the House on the Slope (Outline.2 and Outline.12), two on Büyükkale but in two different buildings (Outline.6 in Bk. G and Outline.9 in Bk. A), and one on Büyükkaya (Outline.13). For the remaining outlines, the precise findspots are unknown.

The only explicit reference to a historical event in the outlines occurs in a fragmentary passage in Outline.1, which mentions King Muršili (probably Muršili II) subjugating unknown territories. Additional indications in the corpus, however, likely allude to specific events or rulers. Celebrations for the Mighty Storm-god (D10 NIR.GÁL) on DAY 3 again point to Muršili II, as he was closely associated with this deity. Furthermore, DAY 16 records celebrations of the Road to Nerik performed in Katapa. This has traditionally been interpreted as to imply that Nerik remained under Kaškaean control and was therefore inaccessible to the Hittites at that time (Haas V. 1970a: 55f.). Note, however, that irrespective of the political situation, Nerik would in any case have been an unlikely destination during the nuntarriyašḫa- festival, given its distance from the capital. All locations visited during the festival lie within approximately three days' travel from Ḫattuša, that is, within the political heartland of the kingdom. By contrast, Nerik – located with a high degree of certainty at modern Oymaağaç – is situated significantly beyond this radius. Nevertheless, the continued instability in the north and the associated Kaškaean threat likely influenced the structure of some versions of the festival. This is suggested by the inclusion, in several outlines, of a day devoted exclusively to the celebrations of the Storm-god of Nerik (DAY 7).

The outline tablets of the nuntarriyašḫa- festival show substantial overlap with those of the spring AN.DAḪ.ŠUM festival (CTH 604), and there is little doubt that texts from both festivals were consulted in the process of composing new versions of the nuntarriyašḫa- festival. In addition, several oracles (listed under CTH 568) contain explicit references to autumn festivals and, in some cases, to the nuntarriyašḫa- festival itself.

Close parallels with the outline tablets can also be found in KUB 25.27 (CTH 629). Although the text shares all formal characteristics of an outline tablet, its colophon identifies it as a different type of composition, namely an instruction on the correct execution of “regular festivals” (EZEN₄ SAG.UŠ).