Hungarian Assyriological Review
HAR – Hungarian Assyriological Review is a peer-reviewed academic journal, covering all periods and regions in Ancient Near Eastern archaeology, history, philology, and linguistics.
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Volume 4 Issue 2 contents:
- Some new Hattian-Hittite correspondences from the quasi bilingual text of CTH 733
- The Hittite words for North, East, South, and West
- Musanzi, Muškanzi und Suranzi in Karkamiš
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This investigation undertakes a comparative analysis of Hattian and Hittite fragments found within the text group of CTH 733, with the primary objective of discerning previously unrecognized bilingual text segments and conducting an in‑depth examination of the syntactic and morphological structures inherent in the Hattian texts. Accordingly, the following lexical additions are proposed as new contributions to the Hattian lexicon: a=X … ma=X ‘the one X there … the other X here’, an ‘sea’ (instead of †ḫan), il ‘to prosper’ (instead of †ḫil), e ‘to eat’ (instead of †tu), pe/iš or u̯eeš/u̯iiš ‘to drink’, and, possibly, uu̯aaēl ‘bread’.
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This paper identifies the Hittite terms for the four cardinal directions. Until now, our understanding of Hittite horizontal cosmology has been limited, with cardinal direction terms often represented logographically. The study collects attestations of these terms, primarily from celestial omen texts, showing that, as in Mesopotamia, the Anatolian orientation system was based on the sun and, crucially, the four winds. The author argues that the Hittite words for North, East, South, and West are tar(a)šmenaš ḫuwanz, ekunaš ḫuwanz, šalliš ḫuwanz, and appezziš/appezziyaš ḫuwanz, meaning ‘the tar(a)šmenaš wind’, ‘the cold wind’, ‘the great wind’, and ‘the rear wind’, respectively.
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The fame of Yariris, a Karkamiš statesman of around 800 BC, did not only reach Egypt and Babylon but also three, probably neighbouring peoples in the north. The Musanzi are here linked with the land Muša between the Euphrates and Malatya, mentioned once in an Urartian inscription, and the Muškanzi with the land Muška, mentioned in two Late Luwian inscriptions of great king Hartapus: probably not Phrygia or another enemy country, but his own land, i.e., the later Lycaonia. The Suranzi are certainly the people of the land Sura, an enemy of Karkamiš, defeated around 1000 BC: probably, the land of the Syr(i)oi or Leukosyrioi in Greek tradition, i.e., Cappadocia.