Critical Edition, Electronic Database, and Systematic Analysis of the Hittite Palace Administrative Corpus (CTH 240-250, 503, 504, 513)
Final Report Abstract
The project produced a number of significant results. The principal achievement was the comprehensive edition of 236 texts, of which only 125 were edited in the previous most recent study of the Hittite administrative corpus, along with glossary and lexical and thematic commentaries – a total of some 850 pages of printed material. These print editions, glossary, and commentaries are to appear with a theoretical, archaeological, and philological introduction to Hittite economic administration along with case studies of the corpus in a monograph in the Studien zu den Boğazköy-Texten series in 2022. In addition, searchable digital editions of the same texts were created, to be hosted on the Hethitologie- Portal Mainz, an open access digital database. Specific research achievements of the project include a number of philological and lexical discoveries. Among the most interesting were: (1) the first recognized attestation of an organ of the Hittite state interacting with private commerce, which revealed the market as a new source for the items attested within the administrative corpus next to tribute and state manufacture; (2) textual confirmation of a recent hypothesis that certain storehouses at the Hittite capital were part of a state-sponsored system, wherein elites connected with the state would entrust at least part of their wealth to communal storage, and that the state could requisition these items, with due compensation, for its own use; (3) strong evidence that the single-largest collection of wealth known from the Hittite text corpus recorded the dowry of a Hittite princess for a previously unknown diplomatic marriage; (4) evidence for the involvement that Hittite co-regents/crown princes were involved in the day-to-day economic administration of the palace; and (5) a reinterpretation of a number of Akkadograms as borrowing from a Hurro-Luwian intermediary, demonstrating the lexical influence of Hurrian (or Kizzuwatnean Luwian) on Hittite economic administration, and rehabilitating the image of Hittite scribal competency in Akkadian in the Late New Kingdom period. In addition to these, numerous improved readings, lexical clarifications, and joins were made to the texts of the Hittite economic administrative corpus. In summary, the project achieved its stated goal of placing the study of Hittite economic administration on a secure, contemporary, and widely-accessible footing for future research.
