Volume 51, Issue 1

During the New Kingdom period, Egypt had frequent contact with the Hittite kingdom, the largest and most powerful of the Anatolian sub-groups. However, there is less information about Egypt’s relations with its neighbors Arzawa and Kaška. This study focuses on Egypt’s perception of and policy toward Kaška, a lesser known Anatolian sub-group located north along the Black Sea. Since there is no direct correspondence between Egypt and Kaška, the study examines Hittite texts that record contact and conflict with Kaška, as well as mentions of Kaška in correspondence between Egypt and Ḫatti and between Egypt and Arzawa. By synthesizing these records and writings, the study sheds light on Egypt’s view of and policy toward Kaška during the New Kingdom period.

The documents of the Central Archive of Ebla systematically cover forty-one or forty-two years for some administrative sectors, while those concerning primary production are only preserved at random. Monthly documents register the expenditures of the textile production by the Administration. A series of annual documents concerns the incomes of unwrought metals, objects in metal, and clothing, while another one concerns the expenditures of metals in the form of plates and in many kinds of objects. Hundreds of undatable documents, moreover, register particular incomes or expenditures of these goods. The rate between silver and gold was for many years 5 : 1 (reduced later to 3: 1, and even to 2.5 : 1). It is therefore possible (in the limits of this documentation) to determine on the one hand the incomes of metals through the deliveries of the ministers and other officials, together with those of the tributary cities, and on the other the amounts of the expended metals year after year. The deliveries from the city-states under the hegemony of Ebla prove that all these metals came from the eastern Taurus Mountains. The rate between silver and refined copper was 1 : 30; with unrefined copper 1 : 37,5; with bronze 1 : 7; and with tin 1 : 1.

This article revises the Hittite text group CTH 683.5 based on three new joins and newly identified duplicates. While large text sections can thus be nearly completed, a lot of passages remain fragmentary, and their translation therefore remains necessarily tentative. The paper concludes with some remarks concerning selected entries of Hittite vocabulary.

The article provides an overview of the history of the Hilprecht Collection at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, with a particular focus on the period after 1926, i.e., the year when Hilprecht’s objects arrived in Jena. Special attention is given to the Neo-Babylonian texts of the collection, most of which were published in copy by Oluf Krückmann in TMH 2/3 in 1933.

This paper is a case study of how the material of copies and originals correlate for a concrete fragment of Hittite grammar – clitic reduplication, double use of the same clitic within the same enclitic chain. It is argued that whereas in part of the copies there is non-trivial interaction of the grammar of the pre-New Hittite original with the grammar of the New Hittite scribe, the data of the copies is relevant and it does represent a real linguistic usage. Thus, copies are reliable as linguistic evidence, unless explicitly shown to be otherwise.

According to some authors, the archives of Ugarit have preserved a small group of texts that could be classified as ‘censuses’. Other authors, however, have argued that these texts record people who were able to work in some way. This article examines the clearest examples of this type of text, the two Ugaritic administrative documents RS 17.312 (KTU 4.295) and RS 18.258 (KTU 4.417). The analysis is carried out in conjunction with the Akkadian letter RS 94.2524, which may provide a better understanding of the nature of the two Ugaritic texts. The discussion also includes a third Ugaritic administrative text, RS 18.026 (KTU 4.339), which seems to complete the process described in both RS 17.312 and RS 18.258. In our view, the four texts provide further evidence of the control that the Ugaritian administration exercised over the population of the kingdom in order to mobilise them for labour purposes.

The Kassite family letter PBS 1/2, 21 concerns a court procedure in which a female sender is involved. In this article I analyse the language and style of PBS 1/2, 21 with the help of “Speech Act Theory”, which shows that the female sender Rīšat-[...] had limited authority and justified her actions with elaborate quotations of men’s orders, thereby transferring responsibility for her actions to the men she quoted. Only four out of 331 Kassite letters from Nippur were sent by women. The other three Kassite letters from a female sender indicate that a woman named Inbi-ajjari held an influential position in the Nippurean administration and was involved in governance processes. Rīšat-[...]’s letter differs considerably from Inbi-ajjari’s letters. While Rīšat-[...]’s letter illuminates a woman’s societal role within a family, Inbi-ajjari’s bēlu letters illustrate the power of influential women outside their family structures.