Seals and sealing practices in hatti-land: remarks a propos the seal impressions from the Westbau in Hattusa.

• Author: van Den Hout, Theo

During the 1990-91 excavation seasons in the Upper City of the Hittite capital Bogazkoy/Hattusa more than 3400 sealed bullae and clay lumps were found in a structure called the Westbau. Not only the very size of the find but also the fact that there were 1364 seal impressions of princes and officials among them promised a wealth of information about the Hittite governmental system and bureaucracy. The publication of this particular group of seals was soon entrusted to Suzanne Herbordt, who was already known for her work on Neo-Assyrian seals and sealing practices. (1) Heinrich Otten took on the task of editing the royal seals. Not long after, however, Prof. Otten retired and the publication of the latter part was also given to Herbordt, assisted by Daliah Bawanypeck. (2) Herbordt made the sealings of princes and officials the topic of her Habilitation at the University of Leipzig, which was accepted in 2000 and subsequently appeared as the book under review. As is usual in the Bogazkoy/Hattusa series, the book is beautifully and flawlessly executed.

Following a brief introduction (chapter I), chapter II (pp. 7-23) offers a detailed description and analysis of the archaeological situation of the Westbau and its inventory. Here the reader will find all the evidence for the distribution of the inscriptional material and thus the original systematic storage of the sealings and charters in the building. A large fold-out map in the back of the book provides the exact location of every single find in the building.

The bullae and sealed clay lumps were found accompanied by land deeds or charters, usually known as Landschenkungsurkunden. This combination was already known from a similar but substantially smaller (some 200 pieces) complex that came to light in 1931 in and around Room 1 in the west corner of Building D on the acropolis Buyukkale. Thanks to modern and more sophisticated excavation techniques, we now know that the bullae of the Westbau were kept on a higher floor level and were filed in groups. The combination of royal and non-royal seals makes it possible, moreover, to link officials to kings and thus to establish a largely chronological system of record keeping. This in turn enables us to determine a stylistic development that is for the first time chronologically secured.

Here (pp. 19, 22) as elsewhere in the book, Herbordt follows Peter Neve's dating of the Westbau and most of the Upper City of Hattusa to the second half of the thirteenth century and in particular to the reign of Tudhaliya IV (c. 1240-1210 B.C.) However, although he certainly left his imprint on the Upper City with three inscribed stelae, (3) Tudhaliya IV can no longer be considered the major builder of this part of the city. Large parts of the Upper City now must be dated back to the sixteenth and fifteenth century, (4) and the Westbau too might well be considerably older than the last half century of the Hittite empire. The assumption of a transfer of the pre-Tudhaliya material to the Westbau from elsewhere (pp. 22f., 39) would thus no longer be necessary. A comparison with similar find complexes in Bogazkoy (Bldg. D, storage rooms surrounding Temple 1, and various temples in the Upper City) and elsewhere in Hittite Anatolia (Kusakh, Tarsus, Korucutepe, and Kaman Kalehoyuk leads Herbordt (pp. 22f.) to define the Westbau tentatively as an administrative structure, a depot for storing valuable items and records, perhaps the kind of building that is known from the Hittite sources as an E [MATHEMATICAL EXPRESSION NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] KISIB, lit. "house of the seal/of sealing." Such institutions were found all over the Hittite empire collecting the taxes of their districts.

This leads naturally into the interesting chapter III (pp. 25-39) on sealing practices in Hittite society. The clay lumps had been used to seal objects of various kinds. In most cases they were formed around cords that must have been suspended from materials to be sealed. In other cases the back of the clay lump shows the impression of leather bags and there is one instance of a textile imprint (p. 34 n. 273).

Herbordt (p. 25) quotes H. G. Guterbock (5) as saying that the Hittite word * siyatar is not attested in the meaning of "(original) seal" (Siegelstock), but in fact it is: A few years after Guterbock's article had appeared, in KUB 33 (1943) Otten published several fragments of the "Song of Ullikummi" that Guterbock was to edit less than a decade later. In this story the god Ea visits Upelluri, the Atlas-like figure to whose shoulder the stone monster Ullikummi is attached and Upelluri tells him about the saw with which long ago they had separated Heaven and Earth. Thereupon Ea orders the Primeval Gods to fetch the saw from the ancestral storehouse, saying, EGIR-pa=at hesten annalla attalla huhadalla E[MATHEMATICAL EXPRESSION NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] KISIB.HI.A nu karuiliyas addas [MATHEMATICAL EXPRESSION NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] KISIB udandu [n = a]t apiz EGIR-pa siyandu "Open them, the old fore-fatherly (and) grandfatherly storehouses and let them bring the seal of the ancestors [and] with that let them seal [th]em again." (6) Although not mentioned by the author, we may also know the Hittite word for "bulla," parzaki-, which was tentatively identified by Silvin Kosak in his book on inventory texts as "label, bulla." (7)

The literally thousands of seal impressions that we now have stand in stark contrast to the few sealed tablets that are attested. As Herbordt observes (pp. 28, 36-39, 111), this situation compares unfavorably to that prevailing at Ugarit and Emar, where many records sealed with the seal of Hittite kings, queens, and high officials were preserved. Of course, in the Hittite tablet collections one might at best expect unsealed drafts and/or copies of the official and sealed records that were sent off. As for the almost complete absence of sealed documents (apart from the charters) that were once deposited in the temples, this problem was identified early on by Heinrich Otten: We do not seem to have Hittite "state archives," that is, the collection of sealed, verified, and legally authentic originals written when they were first issued and--as the cuneiform records seem to indicate--deposited in temples. When Otten made this observation in 1959, (8) there was still hope that such records might be found but it now seems more realistic to assume that most were taken by the ruling class when they abandoned the capital around 1200 B.C. (9) As far as they were not taken, metal tablets are likely to have been melted down by people later inhabiting the site of the former Hittite capital.

According to the author, the reason for the discrepancy between Hattusa on the one hand and Ugarit and Emar on the other lies in the fact that we do not have any private documents from Bogazkoy, that is, official records of the business of state representatives with private individuals. (10) The sole "Privaturkunde in hethitischer Sprache" mentioned in this context (p. 26) is in fact a clay tablet and to invoke the wooden writing boards (ibid). to fill the supposed gap of sealed private records is a somewhat uncomfortable solution, even though the author mentions two passages that attest to the use of wooden tablets for such documents. (11)

The question, of course, remains as to what objects all these bullae and sealed clay lumps belonged, if they were not attached to private records. For the clay lumps (Tonverschlusse) that were used to seal leather bags and other containers the answer is relatively obvious. In these...