The Purity of Kingship: An Edition of CTH 569 and Related Hittite Oracle Inquiries of Tuthaliay IV.

• Author: BECKMAN, GARY
• Position: Review

The Purity of Kingship: An Edition of CTH 569 and Related Hittite Oracle Inquiries of Tuthaliya IV. By THEO VAN DEN HOUT. Documenta et Monumenta Orientis Antiqui, vol. 25. Leiden: E. J. BRILL, 1998. Pp. xxi + 371. $86, HFl 146.

When a Hittite monarch was confronted with a difficult decision, such as whether to undertake a military campaign, or when he faced a crisis, such as a plague ravaging his army or dissension within the royal family, he might seek the advice of the gods by means of one or more oracular techniques, most often extispicy, augury, or a manipulation of symbolic counters in what modern scholars conventionally call the "lot" (KIN) oracle. The king relied on a staff of experts in the various forms of divination, who examined the entrails, birds, or symbols, interpreted the results, and submitted written accounts of their observations to the royal authorities.

A typical excerpt from one of these reports reads: "If the fever will befall His Majesty only there, in the territory of Nerik, but not here, then let (the entrails of) the first duck? be favorable, but let (those of) the latter be unfavorable. (Result: The entrails of) the first duck? were unfavorable, but (those of) the latter were favorable. The same question (researched) by means of the Old Woman (the practitioner responsible for the 'lot' oracle): Let the 'lot' oracle be favorable. (Result:) The 'Deity' took the 'Entire Soul' and set it upon 'Wrath.' Unfavorable." (KBo 2.2 i 12-20--here pp. 124-26, my translation).

A significant number of these divinatory memoranda have been recovered from Bogazkoy/Hattusa, but this material has been relatively neglected by Hittitologists, probably because the oracle reports are on the whole rather poorly inscribed, written in extreme haste by scribes whose attention was focused on the observations taking place before them, and because the details of the procedures which make up a good part of these texts follow an obscure divinatory grammar of little interest to the modern reader.

Yet it has long been recognized that the questions posed to the gods in the Hittite oracle reports constitute an important potential source of historical and sociological information. In studying a culture whose historical writing was tendentious and which did not document many aspects of ordinary life, we might find in the candid communications of the divination priests with the allknowing deities some indications of events and cultural practices "wie es...