Zu einigen Neufunden hethitischer Konigssiegel.

• Author: Beckman, Gary

In 1990, while digging in the remains of a building in the Upper City near the rock outcropping known as Nisantepe, the German archaeological team at the Hittite capital of Bogazkoy/Hattusa came upon a deposit of more than three thousand sealed clay bullae which were duly excavated during this and the following season. Like the pieces in a similar hoard recovered from Building D on the citadel Buyukkale in 1936, these bullae were almost certainly originally affixed to records inscribed on wood. That the lost documents were probably administrative in nature is indicated by the fact that the new find also included around thirty clay tablets recording land grants by the king.

Approximately one-third of the recently recovered bullae bear the impressions of royal seals of the late Middle Kingdom and of the Empire (fourteenth-thirteenth centuries B.C.E.), while the remainder were sealed by a myriad of high officials. In the work under review, Heinrich Otten presents a preliminary discussion of the new glyptic material of the great kings and their queens (in particular, of Arnuwanda I, Suppiluliuma I, Mursili III/Urhi-Tessup, Hattusili III, Puduhepa, and Tudhaliya IV, as well as of Ini-Tessup of Carchemish). Otten's analyses are accompanied by fine photographs of the original objects and, in some cases, by composite drawings of the impressions as reconstructed from multiple examples of the sealings.

On the basis of the glyptic documents surveyed in this work, the author makes a number of contributions to our knowledge of Hittite history and of the sealing practices of the Hittites. The most notable historical advances are the confirmation that Suppiluliuma I was indeed the son of Tudhaliya III (pp. 12f.), and the demonstration that "Hismi"-Sarrumma seemingly did not take his throne name of Tudhaliya IV...