Royal Hittite Instructions And Related Administrative Texts

Few compositions provide as much insight into the structure of the Hittite state and the nature of Hittite society as the so-called Instructions. While these texts may strike the modern reader as didactic, the Hittites, who categorized them together with state treaties, understood them as “contracts” or “obligations,” consisting of the king’s instructions to officials such as priests and temple personnel, mayors, military officers, border garrison commanders, and palace servants. They detail how and in what spirit the officials are to carry out their duties and what consequences they are to suffer for failure. Also included are several examples of closely related oath impositions and oaths. Collecting for the first time the entire corpus of Hittite Instructions, this accessible volume presents these works in transliteration of the original texts and translation, with clear and readable introductory essays, references to primary and secondary sources, and thorough indices.

The most up-to-date sourcebook on warfare in the ancient Near East Fighting for the King and the Gods provides an introduction to the topic of war and the variety of texts concerning many aspects of warfare in the ancient Near East. These texts illustrate various viewpoints of war and show how warfare was an integral part of life. Trimm examines not only the victors and the famous battles, but also the hardship that war brought to many. While several of these texts treated here are well known (i.e., Ramses II's battle against the Hittites at Qadesh), others are known only to specialists. This work will allow a broader audience to access and appreciate these important texts as they relate to the history and ideology of warfare. Features References to recent secondary literature for further study Early Greek and Chinese illustrative texts for comparisons with other cultures Indices to help guide the reader

Our knowledge of ancient Greek religion has been transformed in the last century by an increased understanding of the cultures of the Ancient Near East. Using preserved cuneiform texts, this book explores cases of contact or influence between Ancient Greece and the Hittites to further our understanding of the complex history of religious practices.

A groundbreaking history of the ethics of war in the ancient Near East Origins of the Just War reveals the incredible richness and complexity of ethical thought about war in the three millennia preceding the Greco-Roman period, establishing the extent to which ancient just war thought prefigured much of what we now consider to be the building blocks of the Western just war tradition. In this incisive and elegantly written book, Rory Cox traces the earliest ideas concerning the complex relationship between war, ethics and justice. Excavating the ethical thought of three ancient Near Eastern cultures—Egyptian, Hittite and Israelite—he demonstrates that the history of the just war is considerably more ancient and geographically diffuse than previously assumed. Cox shows how the emergence of just war thought was grounded in a desire to rationalise, sacralise and ultimately to legitimise the violence of war. Rather than restraining or condemning warfare, the earliest ethical thought about war reflected an urge to justify state violence. Cox terms this presumption in favour of war ius pro bello—the “right for war”—characterizing it as a meeting point of both abstract and pragmatic concerns. Drawing on a diverse range of ancient sources, Origins of the Just War argues that the same imperative still underlies many of the assumptions of contemporary just war thought and highlights the risks of applying moral absolutism to the fraught ethical arena of war.

This volume originates from a research project, which was funded within the PRIN program Writing Uses: Transmission of Knowledge, Administrative Practices and Political Control in Anatolian and Syro-Anatolian Polities in the 2nd and 1st Millennium BCE. The project involved ‘research units’ from different Italian universities (Torino, Pavia, Bologna, Firenze, Napoli - Suor Orsola Benincasa). The papers presented here, seek to fill some gaps in our knowledge of the Hittite Empire and its epigones, and offer an updated picture of some aspects of the Hittite and post-Hittite administration in Anatolia and Syria through the analysis and interpretation of epigraphic and archaeological evidence.

There are few studies that deal with an overall treatment of the Hittite administrative system, and various other works on its offices and officials have tended to be limited in scope, focusing only on certain groups or certain time periods. This book provides a comprehensive investigation of the administrative organization of the Hittite state throughout its history (ca. 1650–1180 BCE) with particular emphasis on the state offices and their officials. Bringing together previous works and updating with data recovered in recent years, the study presents a detailed survey of the high offices of the state, a prosopographical study of about 140 high officials, and a theoretical analysis of the Hittite administration in respect to factors such as hierarchy, kinship, and diachronical changes.

This volume is a major contribution to the field of disability history in the ancient world. Contributions from leading international scholars examine deformity and disability from a variety of historical, sociological and theoretical perspectives, as represented in various media. The volume is not confined to a narrow view of ‘antiquity’ but includes a large number of pieces on ancient western Asia that provide a broad and comparative view of the topic and enable scholars to see this important topic in the round. Disability in Antiquity is the first multidisciplinary volume to truly map out and explore the topic of disability in the ancient world and create new avenues of thought and research.

This volume collects 33 papers that were presented at the international conference held at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in November 2015 to celebrate the centenary of Bedřich Hrozný’s identification of Hittite as an Indo-European language. Contributions are grouped into three sections, “Hrozný and His Discoveries,” “Hittite and Indo-European,” and “The Hittites and Their Neighbors,” and span the full range of Hittite studies and related disciplines, from Anatolian and Indo-European linguistics and cuneiform philology to Ancient Near Eastern archaeology, history, and religion. The authors hail from 15 countries and include leading figures as well as emerging scholars in the fields of Hittitology, Indo-European, and Ancient Near Eastern studies.