New texts concerning Hittite Religion – Unpublished cuneiform tablets from Boğazköy and their contribution to the knowledge of intellectual culture in the 2nd Millennium B.C.

• Applicant: Dr. Oguz Soysal
• Subject Area: Egyptology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 579127968

Despite the continuous publication process of the Hittite Cuneiform tablets there are still unpublished fragments from the capital Boğazköy / Hattusa. Bearing the siglum “Bo”, they originated in the early German-Ottoman excavations between 1906-1912 and were sent to the Staatliches Museum in Berlin for cleaning and conservation purposes. After the World War II, the tablets continued to be held by the German Democratic Republic, and it took years until they were delivered back to Turkey in 1987. The number of these fragments is about 7,300 and some of them are published, but almost the half of them remain neither published nor studied. These tablets are available to scholars only in a severely restricted way to the extent they are cited in the secondary literature. The applicant has been carrying on scholarly activities and research on the Bo-texts since 2010, also as a part of the DFG-Project “Unpublished Boğazköy-Fragments: Edition and Research” which was officially launched at the Philipps-University of Marburg in February 2020 and will terminate in February 2026. The proposed new project will continue to deal with this group of epigraphic material, however, this time with a special focus on the texts concerning the elements of the Hittite religious life and its relations to the neighboring cultures. The utilizing of the unpublished Bo-fragments has become an essential element in the history of Hittitology in last thirty years. In this sense, the edition and research of the epigraphic material in question would be a welcome result of a joint German-Turkish scholarly effort. Moreover, the proposed project will be a unique, in fact the only opportunity to have an easy access to the Bo-fragments since the official authorities in Ankara Museum grant permission only to the Turkish scholars for using this unpublished material. The applicant and his collaborator(s), being Turkish citizens and having the publication rights for the tablets in question, will fortunately be not affected by this issue. The results of the research will be published as printed material, i. e., monographs in the series of the Chicago Hittite Dictionary Supplements, and also as the digital version of the same publication as a free download.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Gerfrid G. W. Müller