Hittite Diplomatics: Studies in Ancient Document Format and Record Management.

• Author: Francia, Rita
• Position: Book review

Hittite Diplomatics: Studies in Ancient Document Format and Record Management. By WlLLEMIJN J. I. WAAL. Studien zu den Bogazkoy-Texten, vol. 57. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2015. Pp. xxi + 620, illus. [euro]98.

Recent studies have shifted the focus of Hittitologists from the subject matter of a text to its creation and the organizational apparatus underlying it: archives, scribes, and scribal culture (Gordin 2015, van den Hout 2016). What has been missing until now was an analysis of documents as such, and this is the field of diplomatics: "Diplomatics is the study of the Wesen and Werden of documentation, the analysis of genesis, inner constitution and transmission of documents, and of their relationship with the facts represented in them and with their creators" (Cencetti 1985: 285, translation: Duranti 1989: 7). Waal's book fills this gap. It is a revision of her 2010 Faculty of Arts at Leiden University dissertation. The aims of the book are very ambitious for a single work: "an overview of the most important intrinsic and extrinsic metadata" of Hittite tablets (p. 16), the reconstruction of the stages of the editorial development of documents up until standardization in the late thirteenth century BC, and record management and archival organization (pp. 3, 189).

The book is divided into three main sections: the introduction (chapter 1); the analysis of the physical extrinsic features of tablets, their layout, and the terminology for writing documents (chapters 2-7), along with appendix I (pp. 191-210); the study of colophons and of record management (chapters 8-9), with appendices II and III (pp. 364-509; 553-62), i.e., the text corpus of Hittite colophons, and the scribes' names attested in them.

The second and the third parts are unbalanced: the description of extrinsic features and matters related to them occupies six of seven chapters and without decisive results, with the exception of a few examples (pp. 23ff.). Chapter 8 deals with the description of intrinsic characteristics and is limited to colophons, but lacks detailed explanation (pp. 139-72). Other intrinsic characteristics of documents, such as "the parts determining the tenor of the whole" (Duranti 1991: 11), are completely ignored. Hittite texts are generally introduced by incipits with the "title" and often also with other relevant information not always quoted in colophons (Gordin 2015: 39ff.) and they vary according to text genre. The lesser degree of...