• The wording of Inana’s ‘blessing’, and the characterisation of the gardener in Inana and Šukaletuda 9
• Originators in the Old Babylonian Sumerian literary tradition 25
• Luwische Städte- und Länderglyphen (Hieroglyphic Luwian city and country glyphs) 49
• The Hurro-Urartian loan contacts of Armenian: A revision 63
• Hungarian Assyriological Review author guidelines 91

The present paper examines the wording of the fate decree in the mythic story Inana and Šukaletuda (ll. 296–301). Šukaletuda receives eternal fame from Inana, which resembles the fates destined for great kings. Nonetheless, Šukaletuda’s fate subtly differs from the kings’ share. According to administrative documents, milk churners, shepherd-boys, and novice singers are low-class workers. Thus, the characters who are selected to transmit Šukaletuda’s story belong to his own class, and thus, relativise the benefits of his destiny.

In the Mesopotamian scribal culture, the compositions’ lack of titles and authors was justified by their oral origin. As pieces of literature gained their written form gradually, compilers and editors of the texts were responsible for the long process of selection, edition as well as the arrangement and rearrangement of the material. This resulted in an anonymous and somewhat chaotic textual culture. The birth of the author, or rather, the emergence of several models of authorship attempted to establish order in this chaos.
In this paper, I propose four models of attributed authorship based on examples from the Old Babylonian period and elaborate on the functions related to each. Attributed authorship, as I argue, aimed to anchor selected literary compositions in time and space. Authors contributed to the classification and interpretation of a body of ancient or invented literary tradition. Furthermore, attributed authors contributed to the preservation of a given text as a unit that might otherwise have been subject to disintegration or further revision and redaction.

The Luwian hieroglyphic script has special signs for towns and countries. At least nine are attested in Empire Luwian inscriptions, only four of them returning in Late Luwian inscriptions. Four others are attested in Late Luwian inscriptions only but may be inherited from Empire Luwian too. In two cases, signs for gods are used as signs for towns and countries in Empire Luwian only. In one case a common Empire Luwian logogram/syllabogram is used, possibly as an abbreviation. Phonetic complements are attested in some instances, and in Late Luwian also full phonetic writings occur instead of the special signs or immediately after them (four cases).

The sign *85 should not be transcribed as GENUFLECTERE like an otherwise attested Empire Luwian sign but should revert to HALPA. The transcriptions VITIS2 or VITIS+x for an Empire Luwian sign are inappropriate, because this sign is attested solely as denoting an unidentified toponym, and is evidently more than a mere variant of VITIS. Therefore, it is proposed that it be transcribed as *160+. The Empire Luwian and the Late Luwian writing for – probably – ‘Babylon’, both with the phonetic complement -la, were transcribed with different numbers, but the earlier form is not really *292 and shares the crosshatching with the later form *475. Therefore, it is proposed that they be transcribed as *475a and b.

The present paper critically revises the Hurro-Urartian loanwords of Armenian as well as the alleged Armenian loans in Urartian. It argues that while the existence of the Hurro-Urartian loanword layer in Armenian is undeniable, the number of the certain cases is much smaller than previously assumed. Furthermore, none of the proposed Armenian loans in Urartian can be maintained on linguistic grounds.