Cult inventory

(CTH 529.62)

Textual tradition

Basis of the edition

The present edition is based on the photographs available at the Mainzer Photoarchiv of the Hethitologie Portal Mainz, as well as the available hand-copies and relevant secondary literature up to 2019. When the original manuscripts have been collated, this is noted in the commentary.

Commentary

Previous editions: Haas 1970: 309-10.

This fragment of a presumably two-columned tablet, dealing with the cults of Nerik, is presently classified as CTH 678, a group of texts closely related to the genre of cult inventories; in Cammarosano 2013: 89 I proposed to include the text in the latter group. The mention of the king in obv. 9′ does not represent an argument against this hypothesis, since it is embedded in a direct speech.

On the obverse, the text reports on rites (i 2′: lukattima “on the morrow,” etc.), mentions “His Majesty” (i 3′, 4′, 10′) and the towns of “Ḫakmiš, Nerik, and Ḫawalkina,” and refers to the existence of “separate tablets” (i 8′, cf. DAAM 1.39 i 8). On lines i 9′ and 11′ the daḫanga, a sacred building located in Nerik, is mentioned, on which see Lamante 2014. The reverse contains a list of festivals for gods of Nerik; noteworthy are the pairing of harvest and autumn festival (rev. 3′, 5′, 7′, see Cammarosano 2018: 131), and a rite of purification of the lela- described in lines iv 8′-9′, involving a cult stela and the goddess Ḫannaḫanna (DINGIR.MAḪ). The word lela occurs again in rev. iv 11′, but it is unclear whether this is to be interpreted as an archaizing allative of lela- (comm.) or it belongs to another stem.

Palaeography and orthography: Late QA (iv 5′, 6′, 8′). Note the use of “redundant” wedges, e.g. in IT, EŠ (iv 10′), and the use of different variants of the same sign (ḪA, e.g. obv. 6′ vs. obv. 7′; LI, e.g. iv 6′, 8′).

rev. 2′: The attribution to the ḫarpiya or ḫarpiyaš festival is uncertain, see Cammarosano 2018: 137.

iv 4′: It seems impossible to decide with certainty whether the two Winkelhaken are a mistake for (D)UTU or for (D)10, but the former option seems to me more likely. Van Gessel 1998 books this occurrence both for D10 and DUTU (p. 761 and 875 respectively).

i 8′-9′: For this passage, see Steitler 2019 with fn. 4. NA₄ZI.KIN lelaššalla is tentatively translated “propitiatory (?) stela” in HED L 78.

CC BY-SA 4.0 Michele Cammarosano | Produced as part of the research project Critical edition, digital publication, and systematic analysis of the Hittite cult-inventories (CTH 501-530), funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) – project number 298302760, 2016–2020.