Project description

The festive ritual texts are the most extensive group of cuneiform texts from Hittite Anatolia. They offer a uniquely dense documentation of the cult system and its administration in the Ancient Near East.

Reconstruction and indexing of this text corpus in the form of web-based editions are the main goals of the project ›Corpus der hethitischen Festrituale‹ (HFR); as well as the investigation of paleographic, linguistic, and religious and administrative history core questions posed by this text group.

Key digital technologies for the edition and study of Hittite cuneiform texts will be further developed as part of the project. With its complex questions, its editorial scope, and its innovative methodology, HFR marks a new departure in Hittite research.

The ceremonial ritual texts (currently over 10,000 fragments) are succinctly worded, but often extensive prescriptions for the performance of cult outside the daily provisioning of the deities on specific, often seasonally determined occasions. The corpus spans all periods of Hittite history and includes all tradition strands and milieus constitutive of the historical development of Hittite religion.

 

The corpus of festive ritual texts comes mainly - but not exclusively - from the archives of the capital Hattusa. It is evidence of a state cult administration whose task was to ensure the observance of cult duties for the royal house; it informs us in detail about Hittite cult as a religious practice with high political, social, and economic significance. In doing so, the texts not only shed light on the temple cult of the capital at different times, but also provide information about the cults in many other cities of the empire.

 

 

Despite a great deal of preparatory work, the enormous volume and the difficult situation of the texts' transmission as well as the strong fragmentation of the handwritten sources (cuneiform tablets) pose special challenges for the reconstruction and editorial indexing of the corpus of Hittite festive rituals, which can only be mastered within the framework of long-term, cooperative research and within an information technology infrastructure tailored to the project.

 

Curing the course of the project, transliterations of all manuscripts of festive ritual texts will be entered into a digital base corpus, extensively annotated with metadata, which will allow complex research with regard to both manuscript and text reconstruction and at the same time topically index fragments that cannot yet be assigned to a single text or text complex. The basic corpus is lemmatized, indexed by glossaries and provided with combined searchable metadata. Together with the digital recording and scribal metrological analysis of the fragments, the basic corpus is an essential working tool for the reconstruction of manuscripts and their assignment to texts.

Critical editions are being prepared for 18 text complexes within the corpus of festive rituals, selected with regard to the state of research and significance. Among them are the great travel festivals in spring and autumn, the ki.lam festival, the rituals for Huwassanna, and the local cults of Arinna, Nerik, and Zippalanda.

 

Like the annotated base corpus, the critical editions are conceived as web-based, continuously growing, open access publications within the digital infrastructure of the Hittitologie-Portal Mainz (HPM). The critical editions include introductions, synoptic transcriptions of duplicate manuscripts including a 'master-text' transcription, translations, epigraphic and philological annotations, and links to photographs of individual manuscripts in the Mainz Photo Archive. The informational backbone of the base corpus and editions are the indexes of the concordance of Hittite cuneiform tablets of the HPM, which are being further developed within the framework of HFR.

The primary publication medium for base corpus and editions is the World Wide Web within the HPM infrastructure. All texts are accessible through a print-on-demand print-viewing tool. Editions with master text, translation, introductions, and an apparatus limited to content variants will be presented as printed works in four volumes ›Hittite Festive Rituals‹ (HFr 1-4). Also published as printed works will be overarching thematic studies on paleography, language, and the religious and administrative history of Hittite festive rituals, as well as the dissertations and symposium files produced as part of HFR.

HFR is scheduled to run for a total of 21 years (2016–36). The project is divided into three workplaces and is located at the Mainz Academy (Hittitologie-Archive) and the universities of Marburg and (from 2019) Würzburg.