SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The Hittite cultic calendar is structured by two major festivals to be celebrated by the king in spring and autumn respectively. The spring festival of the AN.DA.ŠUM-plant stretches over 38 days and includes not only rituals in the temples of the capital, but a number of local spring festivals the king had to celebrate. For obvious reasons a comprehensive reconstruction of the ritual texts of this festival is still a task for the future: Concise outline tablets offer a brief overview of the ritual as a whole, but the rites of each day must be reconstructed based on the ‘day tablets’, usually comprising more than one tablet for each day. The problems one faces when reconstructing the ‘day tablets’ include their stereotype language, the lack of a serialised division of tablets, the great number of small fragments without colophon and the existence of several redactions of the text. The article addresses two points crucial to any attempt at reconstructing the festival: It is argued that contrary to recent studies KBo 4, 13+//, a tablet containing rites that must have been central to the festival as a whole, cannot be interpreted as an opening ceremony, but rather represents a festival celebrated in the palace quarters on day 10 and probably was added to the festival rather late. The last part of the article examines the rituals of the second day. The discussion of the fragments that have been assigned to this day results in a revised presentation of the relevant material and shows that a whole group of fragments have to be re-assigned to (an early version of) day 10. Based on a discussion of the linguistic features of the tablets of day 2 it is argued that an early form of the AN.DA.ŠUM-festival could predate the Middle Hittite period.