The Hittite Corpus of Divinatory Texts: Digital Edition and Cultural Historical Analysis

• Applicants: Privatdozentin Dr. Birgit Christiansen; Professor Dr. Enrique Jiménez; Professor Dr. Daniel Schwemer
• Subject Area: Egyptology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 494541176

Divination played a crucial role in the Late Bronze Age kingdom of the Hittites. With more than 1750 mostly fragmentarily preserved clay tablets, the corpus of divinatory texts is the third largest group among the Hittite religious texts. The texts document a variety of divinatory practices and religious ideas, some of which are of Anatolian origin, while others were adopted from neighboring regions. Particularly, the oracle reports are unparalleled in any other ancient civilization and extant in large numbers. Since they often deal with misconduct and conflicts that are otherwise obscured or presented in a biased manner, they are an extremely important source both for historical research and the understanding of Hittite religious ideas and moral concepts. The same is true for oracle letters, votive texts and dream reports. Of great significance is also the Hittite collection of omen texts of Mesopotamian origin. Interestingly, it is by far the largest and most important collection of omens dating back to the second millennium from which only few omen texts have survived from Mesopotamia proper. The texts, which are written in the Akkadian, Hittite or Hurrian language, reflect the thorough concern of the Hittites for the Mesopotamian omen tradition and provide crucial insight into the transfer of knowledge between different regions of the ancient Near East. Along with omen texts discovered in Syria and northern Mesopotamia, the corpus handed down from Hattusa is a key component in the reconstruction of the long history of Mesopotamian omen traditions, which crystallized in the canonical series known to us only from manuscripts of the first millennium BCE. Despite their great importance not only to Ancient Near Eastern Studies, but also to cross-cultural research, the Hittite divinatory texts have so far only been partially edited and examined. Our nine-year project aims to fill this research gap and make the corpus easily accessible to specialists and a broader, interdisciplinary audience. This will be achieved by the following steps: 1. an open-access, fully annotated digital edition of the entire corpus on the platform Hethitologie-Portal Mainz (HPM); 2. a series of detailed studies on various graphical, linguistic, and content-related issues; 3. a book publication with editions of selected divinatory texts; 4. a monograph, intended to offer both experts and a wider audience a comprehensive insight into Hittite divinatory texts and practices; In addition, through the organization of three interdisciplinary workshops we intend to stimulate exchange between different disciplines and open up new paths for cross-cultural research.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants