Two Festivals Celebrated by a Hittite Prince (CTH 647.1 and II-III): New Light on Local Cults in North-Central Anatolia in the Second Millennium BC.

• Author: Barsacchi, Francesco G.
• Position: Book review

Two Festivals Celebrated by a Hittite Prince (CTH 647.1 and II-III): New Light on Local Cults in North-Central Anatolia in the Second Millennium BC. By PIOTR TARACHA. Studien zu den Bogazkoy-Texten, vol. 61. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2017. Pp. xix + 222, pls. [euro]68.

The work reviewed here appears at a time of renewed interest in the Hittite festival tradition. It is the result of lengthy research, started by the author, Piotr Taracha, in the early 1990s and continued, although intermittently, for more than twenty years. Such a long endeavor has resulted in a dense and well-thought-out edition of two groups of texts (CTH 647.1, II-III) describing festivals performed by a Hittite prince (DUMU.LUGAL) in a peripheral center of the Hittite state, identified by the author as the city of Durmitta, in northern Anatolia. The Middle Hittite ceremony classified as CTH 647.II-III would represent, according to Taracha's analysis, a local seasonal festival performed in the spring, and incorporated, from the Early Empire Period, within the official cult of the state, while the later composition CTH 647.1, preserved in New Script copies, seems to describe a local AN.TAH.SUM festival, the structure of which was largely based on the pre-existing Middle Hittite ceremony.

The book is divided into four chapters. Chapter 1 (The Sources) presents the manuscripts and discusses their organization and respective order. The fragments of the Middle Hittite festival are attributed by the author to thirteen different exemplars, written in Middle and New Script, including both single-column and two-column tablets. The oldest feature an early Middle Script, while the latest are preserved in late New Script manuscripts, which leads the author to the important conclusion that the local spring festival continued to be copied by the Hittite scribes into the second half of the thirteenth century BC. This is reflected in the distribution of the copies, with the oldest texts preserved in Building A on the Acropolis of Buyukkale, and the later ones in the stores of Temple I in the Lower City. The findspots of the manuscripts are analyzed in the framework of the most recent theories concerning the development of the main deposits of texts in the city of Hattuaa during the last centuries of Hittite history.

In the last section of the first chapter, the author proposes a hypothetical stemma codicum based on philological considerations. The arrangement of the sources and the...