A New Duplicate Fragment of the Hittite Instructions to Temple Officials

Extract

This piece was shown in Ankara some years ago to the present writer, whose copy of it is reproduced overleaf. It contains most of what corresponds to lines 2–14 of column III of the best preserved text (Bo. 2019, KUB. XIII, 4, Sturtevant's A) of the instructions to priests and temple officials published, with supplements from six fragmentary duplicate pieces, by E. H. Sturtevant in JAOS. 54 (1934), 363–406 (at pp. 380–1, 402–3), and, with improvements but with omission of some fragmentary passages, by Sturtevant and G. Bechtel in A Hittite Chrestomathy (1935), 127–74 (at pp. 137, 156–7, 172); five more fragments have been published as KUB. XXXI, 92–5; XL, 63.

None of these eleven fragments contains the part of the instructions surviving on the present piece, though what appears to be a similar double vertical ruling at the right of the fragment Bo. 3914 (KUB. XXVI, 31, Sturtevant's F, belonging also to column III and beginning at a point a little after the point at which the text of the present piece ends) permits the suggestion that that fragment may have belonged to the same tablet as the present piece. But the condition in which Bo. 2019 itself has survived in the passage partly covered by the present new fragment leaves little room for completion or improvement of the text; most of the variants now offered, and listed below the following transliteration, are orthographic.