Akkadische Rituale aus Hattusa: Die Sammeltafel KBo XXXVI 29 und verwandte Fragmente.

• Author: Scurlsck, JoAnn
• Position: Review

Akkadische Rituale aus Hattusa: Die Sammeltafel KBo XXXVI 29 und verwandte Fragmente. By DANIEL SCHWEMER. Texte der Hethiter, vol. 23. Heidelberg: UNIVERSITATSVERLAG C. WINTER, 1998. Pp. xxiv + 194, 6 plates. DM 98 (paper).

The book under review consists of an edition of KBo XXXVI 29 (and parallels KBo IX 50 obv. KBo XXXVI 34, KUB IV 77, and KUB XXXVII 93) plus KBo XXXVI 63, KUB IV 17-18, and KUB XXXVII 53-54, 57, 62, 65-66, 72, 74, 86, 90, 96-98). It contains transliterations, translations and commentaries, a discussion of paleography, indices (including glossaries of Akkadian, Hittite, and Hurrian terms) and photographs of KBo XXXVI 29 and 34.

Particularly worthy of note is the section on the "Schrift und Sprache der Texte" (pp. 8-52). In it, the author lays out in considerable detail (including a Labat-style sign list [pp. 17-39] and syllabary [pp. 39-44]) the justification for a new classification system, developed by G. Wilhelm and his students, to describe Akkadian texts from Bogazkoy. Many of these texts are written in a script indistinguishable from that of Hittite texts of the same date, and were presumably written (and probably composed) at Hattusa. Others, however, are sufficiently distinctive to suggest that they were direct imports, whereas a third group exhibits a "Mischduktus" that suggests copying of original Akkadian by Hittite scribes. What is perhaps less expected is that the Akkadian in question is not written in Middle Babylonian script but in an early Middle Assyrian script which Wilhelm has called "assyro-mittanisch" and attributed to a "Mittani-Schule" or distinctive northern Mesopotamian scribal tradition.

Although often frustratingly incomplete, the text itself contains a number of very interesting rituals. One involves a ritual meal and offerings to the spirits of stillborn children (kubu), another the transferral of evils by filling the mouth with blood and beer and spitting it out onto a surrogate. Most curious is a ghost-surrogate burial ritual involving the immurement in the drainage hole of a wall of a specially manufactured reed puppet (see below). The author's reconstruction of this puppet, a miniature woman imagined as a gift "wife" for an afflicting ghost, is masterful, and the accompanying illustration (p. 65) a delight. In the course of the ritual, the puppet is "married" to the ghost via a mock wedding ceremony complete with a "dowry," and given travel provisions for the happy couple's journey back to...