Mittani Palaeography.

• Author: Martino, Stefano De

Mittani Palaeography. By ZENOBIA S. HOMAN. Cuneiform Monographs, vol. 48. Leiden: BRILL, 2020. Pp. xvii + 393. $197.

The book reviewed here has appeared at a time when cuneiform palaeography is at the center of scholarly debate and the use of digital sciences has begun to be employed regarding this topic with very productive results. Zenobia Homan deserves credit for courageously dealing with the analysis of the Mittanian cuneiform script, which is the most difficult and elusive topic in the field of ancient Near Eastern philology.

The book opens with an overview regarding the state of art of Mittanian palaeography. Indeed, it is the first presentation of the corpora that exhibit the features of the Mittanian script. These include not only the texts from the region under the political control of Mittani, but also a portion of Assyro-Mittanian and Middle Assyrian tablets. Furthermore, some documents from Tigunanum are included in Homan's investigation.

In the second chapter the author presents her methodological approach and the categories that she has selected for analysis, namely, 1) the sign, 2) the sign-form, which includes the primary form as well its derivations, 3) any possible sign variant--a category that includes instances that differ from the primary form, but do not constitute their own form type, and 4) occurrences. This last category refers to uncommon or rare instances that may possibly be scribal mistakes. The accuracy of the statistical analysis of the selected documents is assured by the direct examination of some of the tablets preserved at the British Museum in London and at the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin. However, the author was unable to get direct access to documents kept in other museums and countries.

A rich illustrative apparatus allows the reader to follow the steps of the author's research and offers useful material for further study.

The main problem when working on Hurrian documentation is the scarcity of texts coming from the core region of Mittani. The author has taken into consideration all the documents available and has selected among three non-homogeneous subcorpora: the Amarna letters from Mittani, which are official documents issued by the state chancery; other tablets coming from various Syrian polities subordinated to Mittani; and some magical rituals from Hattusa that are written in the Assyro-Mittanian ductus.

The letters sent from Mittani to Egypt give the most precise idea of the script in use among the scribes of the Mittanian state chancery. The second group of texts, which the...