Description

This is the first volume in a new series, Chicago Hittite Dictionary Supplements, designed to augment and supplement the work of the Chicago Hittite Dictionary project. Future volumes will continue to bring tablets written in the Hittite language to light. The volume presented here (ABoT II) is the continuation of the cuneiform edition Ankara Arkeoloji Muezesinde Bulunan Bogazkoy Tabletleri (ABoT) published by Kemal Balkan in 1948. The Hittite tablets, which were acquired by the Ankara Anadolu Medeniyetleri Muezesi by purchase and donations, or collected as surface finds, bear the siglum "AnAr". The best-preserved and attractive pieces of these tablets have been made accessible to the scholarly public through the publication of ABoT; the others, however, were not considered for publication at that time. Since the series of ABoT was later discontinued, such fragments, mostly still useful and in reasonable condition, remained untouched in the Ankara Museum for years. When Rukiye Akdooan decided to make copies of nearly four hundred AnAr fragments and publish them as ABoT II, an agreement of cooperation with Oguz Soysal for the preparation of the catalogue of this work was made in the year 2005. Although the cuneiform copies in other similar works like ABoT and IBoT I-IV were made by Turkish scholars (K. Balkan, M. C. H. Kzlyay, and M. Eren), the support of foreign scholars (H. G. Gueterbock and H. A. Hoffner) was still sought. ABoT II, on the other hand, is a fully Turkish cuneiform edition as a welcome result of a joint Ankara-Chicago effort. The small size of most of the fragments made it particularly difficult to determine the text genres and to place them in the text categories assigned in E. Laroche's Catalogue des textes hittites (CTH). Nevertheless, after two years of intensive work and with the support of the Chicago Hittite Dictionary Projects lexical files, it has been possible to find many duplicates of well-known compositions from Bogazkoy. This volume will certainly enrich the Hittite text corpus. The represented text genres herein include historical, administrative and technical, lexical, mythological texts, hymns and prayers, rituals, cult administration and inventory texts, divination documents, festival descriptions, and compositions in languages other than Hittite (Hattian, Hurrian, Luwian, Sumerian and Akkadian). With the present edition of 389 pieces in cuneiform copies, there are almost no more AnAr fragments remaining in the Ankara Museum that would be worth publishing.