J. D. Hawkins

Assyrians and Hittites

“Evil Hittites without respect for the command of the gods, whisperers of treachery”—these and similar reproaches were hurled by Sargon IIs scribes against the peoples of Syria and Palestine who would not submit to the Assyrian yoke, or who having submitted sought relief in rebellion. Sargons anger marked a crisis in the long but intermittent Assyrian relationship with the Anatolian peoples of North Syria and the Taurus, loosely termed “Hittites”. The purpose of this article is to review the sources for this relationship from the fall of the Hittite Empire, c . 1200 B.C. until the final extinction of the Syrian successor states by the Assyrians under Sargon. In it I shall concentrate on the less well-known evidence of the hieroglyphic inscriptions and refer to the comparatively better-known Assyrian cuneiform documentation only in so far as it illuminates these. It is a study which I hope may be appropriately dedicated to Sir Max Mallowan, whose archaeological work has provided so much material of the latter type, and whose interests amply attested by his publications have always centred on the tracing of links between various cultures, not the least between Assyria and the West.

The Negatives in Hieroglyphic Luwian

The reading of the Hieroglyphic signs had from the early days of decipherment been linked with that of other signs, in particular with , and with the two forms of the RELATIVE, an association based on similarity of appearance as well as the parallelism of the distinction by means of the double stroke at the base. The evaluation of as the “vowel series” i / ī / a / ā by Meriggi, and the recognition of the RELATIVE signs as such by Forrer, divided the way between these two groups. The phonetic reading of the relative remained long in doubt. An earlier reading as ia etc., based on a confusion with the “vowel signs” was rejected by Gelb, while Gelbs own reading of ki was discarded by Bossert, who on largely invalid grounds postulated a phonetic development kwa > hwa > wa . In spite of the dubious points in his argument, Bossert has generally been followed, at least in his reading hwa , especially since the identification of a number of Hieroglyphic verbs employing in their writing the signs REL/REL 2 with corresponding cuneiform Luwian verbs written with a hu or ku(-wa) . Most recently it has been argued that the relative belongs to the class of - i -stems with a presumed reading hwi -.

The logogram “LITUUS” and the verbs “TO SEE” in Hieroglyphic Luwian

The sign LITUUS ( H H , no. 378) has posed a long-standing riddle in the decipherment of Hieroglyphic Luwian. The attribution to it of a sibilant syllabic value1 from the supposed Hieroglyphic/Alphabetic correspondences in the name Azatiwatas in KARATEPE has been shown to have been a false start2. It was noted at the same time that in the group VAS + LITUUS, LITUUS performs the same function as the double bars across the base of za and ia3, which derive from an original a written in ligature4. Kala§ has now produced further evidence on this by showing that VAS + double bars = za in the same way as VAS + LITUUS = za5. Thus in this usage, LITUUS apparently denotes no more than the ¿-vocalization of the syllabogram to which it is attached. Elsewhere it occurs occasionally written not in ligature in the

On the Problems of Karatepe: the Hieroglyphic Text

The great bilingual of Karatepe is one of the best understood inscriptions in Hieroglyphic Luwian, though not all problems have yet been solved. On the one hand some readings remain uncertain, since no full set of photographs is available, and on the other hand the grammatical and semantic interpretation is not always clear in spite of the help provided by the Phoenician version. In this paper we propose to tackle some of the problems still open, taking as a starting point the text and interpretation published by Piero Meriggi in his Manuale (II/1, 69 ff.), which at present offers the most complete and up-to-date version of the inscription. In transliterating we adopt the values listed in Anatolian Studies XXV (1975), 153–5, which we also used in our transliteration and discussion of the last part of KARATEPE ( JRAS 1975/2, 124 ff.). We here use the same section and word numbering as in the latter contribution.

The Babil Stele of Assurnasirpal

The three fragments of a much worn Assyrian stele to be seen in Adana Museum were not, as might have been supposed, found locally in Cilicia. Instead they have been identified as pieces found by C. F. Lehmann-Haupt in the spring of 1899, in the course of a journey down the Tigris from Siirt to Mosul. They were discovered at the village of Babil, some 25 km. south-west of the modern town of Cizre, which is situated in south-eastern Turkey on the Tigris, at the point where the present Turkish-Syrian border joins the river. Babil also now lies directly on the Turkish border. Lehmann-Haupt related the site, circumstances and finds on two occasions in his published works. The finds included “eine Anzahl von Steinfragmenten mit assyrischen Inschriften”, six of which he described perfunctorily and with considerable inaccuracy. He correctly identified parts of a stele of Assurnasirpal II, but did not attempt any further reading of the worn and broken text.

Hamath in the Iron age: the Inscriptions

The inscriptions found in Hamath and its territory documenting its rulers in the early Iron Age include a series of Hieroglyphic Luwian monuments extending from the 11th to 9th cent. bc, a single Aramaic stele of the 8th cent., and four Assyrian stelae of the early and later 8th century. Two of these rulers may be identified with Hamathites named in Assyrian royal inscriptions, Irhuleni and Zakur, and another in an Akkadian letter written to him by a ruler of Anat on the middle Euphrates, Rudamu. These references are important for tying the chronology of the kingdom of Hamath to the reliable Assyrian system of dating.

The Lower Part of the Meharde Stele

Photographs of the lower part of a sculptured inscribed Neo-Hittite stele were brought to me at London University in May 1988 by its owner, Mr. Nassib Sabbagh, of Beirut. Visible on the obverse were the remains of a panel of sculpture showing a couchant lion facing right with a pair of human feet, frontally rendered, standing in the middle of its back. Below this were two lines of writing, running sinistroverse-dextroverse, and below that the remains of the tenon which would have fixed the stele in a morticed base. The lower right corner of the obverse was destroyed. Photographs of the sides showed on the right, three lines of inscription, of which only the lower part of the upper was preserved, the middle, sinistroverse, line was complete, and the upper part of the lower line only was preserved, while its lower part, and any further writing, was lost with the steles lower right hand corner; and on the left, three complete lines of writing, running sinistroverse, dextroverse, sinistroverse, and below them space for a further line, which could have lost its writing through surface flaking, but was more probably uninscribed.

The Old Babylonian Tablets from Al-Rimah@@@The Old Babylonian Tablets from Tell al Rimah

A study of all the Old Babylonian tablets from Tell al Rimah found by Professor David Oates during the years of 1964 to 1971.