Ersetzen und Entsuhnen: Das mittelhethitische Ersatzritual fur den Grosskonig Tuthalija (CTH *448.4) und verwandte Texte.

• Author: Beckman, Gary
• Position: Book Review

By PIOTR TARACHA. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East, vol. 5. Leiden: BRILL, 2000. Pp. xxiii + 307. $86.

In this volume Piotr Taracha presents us with a masterful edition of a purificatory ritual for members of the Hittite royal house. As is commonly the case with undertakings of this sort, the composition has been reconstructed from dozens of tablet fragments, some as yet unavailable in hand-copy. The author establishes a text of two or three tablets, with significant gaps still unfilled, and shows that this rite was represented in the archives by at least ten duplicate manuscripts and six parallel texts.

While most of the pieces were inscribed in the late fourteenth or thirteenth centuries, Text I.a.A may be dated to the late Middle Hittite period (beginning of the fourteenth century). Therefore the author is certainly correct in identifying the king Tuthaliya mentioned several times in the composition as Tuthaliya II, father of Suppiluliuma I.

In his commentary, Taracha clears up numerous philological problems and points out features shared by this ceremony with other royal substitution rituals (CTH 419-21), with the funerary rites for the monarch and members of his family (CTH 450), and with the Prayer of Gassuliyawiya (CTH 380). He also demonstrates that Syrian religious conceptions, mediated of course by the Luwian culture of southeastern Anatolia, exerted significant influence on Hittite magical practice already in the Old Kingdom.

This book may be seen as a continuation of the research begun by the late H. M. Kummel in his Ersatzrituale fur den hethitischen Konig (1967), and is a worthy companion to that work.

I continue with a few technical comments:

p. 30: Since the traces before SA in HT 12: 1' (Text 3.10) seem to be -i]s, read ]x-sa-nu-wa-[??]is[??] SA GIS x[.

p. 32: The author plausibly restores Bo 3385 (Text 1.a.F) i 6' as [(u-i)t-ma-an-za-an] after the identical context in the colophon of KUB 43.55 (Text 2) rev. v 6': u-it-ma-an-za-an (see p. 24). The enclitic chain here, however, presents difficulties. Although the glossary (p. 225) indicates the presence of the enclitic acc. sg. com. pronoun (=an=) here, this is impossible because the primary verb austa already has a direct object in teshan. I interpret the sequence as uit=ma=<>za= san. For...