Description

The monograph offers a large number of unpublished text fragments in photo and transliteration and gives succinct philological notes to these fragments. The fragments are part of a large collection that had been found during the early German campaigns at the Hittite capital Hattusa before the Second World War. The fragments were taken to the Staatliche Museen in Berlin (which fell to Eastern Germany after the war) and were finally returned by the German Democratic Republic to Turkey (the Museum of Ancient Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara) in the year 1987. They were then divided among a team of eminent Turkish Hittitologists under the supervision of Sedat Alp, but most of the pieces remained unpublished. Following a decision of the Turkish Ministry of Culture in 2010, a new team was formed, partly consisting of members of the former team, but also supplemented by several Turkish Hittitologists of the younger generation. The author of the present monograph is one of these new team members. Oguz Soysal is an experienced Hittitologist and the author of a number of important publications, which received much attention in the field. In more than one case he has already dealt with unpublished fragments, and on these occasions he has shown himself to be a skilled editor of new texts. As a collaborator of the Hittite Dictionary of the University of Chicago, Soysal was able to draw upon the rich lexical files of this project in order to assign fragments to a text or even join them together with other fragments. Soysal provides photographs and transliterations of each piece. This is a very felicitous decision. Photos offer the users of his book all the information needed on the sign forms of the fragments, and the transliterations show how Soysal has interpreted those signs. Wherever necessary, Soysal gives philological notes to explain certain forms or to present relevant text variants. Each fragment, if possible, is accompanied by information on its assignment to a Hittite text or text genre, the date of the composition, the fragment's measurements, and previous bibliography. After the presentation of the fragments highly useful indexes on onomastics and lexicographical matters close the book.