The Hittite Palace Administrative Corpus
Philologische Bearbeitung, elektronische Datenbank und systematische Analyse des hethitischen Palastverwaltungskorpus (CTH 240-250, 503, 504, 513)
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Projektnummer 382183667 (2017–21)
Leitung: Dr. James Burgin
The project “Critical Edition, Electronic Database, and Systematic Analysis of the Hittite Palace Administrative Corpus (CTH 240-250, 503, 504, 513)” edited and digitized the economic records of the central government of the Hittite state. The Hittite Palace-Temple Administrative Corpus (PTAC) is one of the only glimpses into the day-to-day working of the Hittite state at its peak as one of the most important powers in the Late Bronze Age Near East. The corpus consists largely of inventories of raw materials or luxury goods in single copy. The laconic nature of the PTAC means that understanding any individual text requires synthetic study of the corpus as a whole. Since the corpus was last edited thirty-five years ago, the number of fragments attributable to the corpus has nearly doubled, from 125 to 236, and advances in archaeology and philology have reconfigured understanding of the economy and early statehood in Hittite Anatolia. It was thus vital that the Hittite administrative corpus be re-edited to include the new texts and re-evaluated with the latest theory and historical models.
The specific achievements of the project are:
Revised and Expanded Edition of the HPAC
A total of 236 editions were created, exhaustive of the current known economic administrative texts found at the Hittite capital Ḫattuša, encompassing over 500 printed pages- A total of six indirect and four direct joins were found during the preparation of the edition, and almost all other texts were able to be assigned to an administrative genre. Although the 125 texts from previous editions were on the whole well-edited, almost every text received improved readings and translations.
Database “Hittite Palace Administrative Corpus”
A total of 250 digital editions were created (the discrepancy in number of editions is due to the treatment of duplicate texts as separate files in digital versions. with each fragment, including duplicates, receiving its own file). The editions include transliteration, translation, and selected philological commentary. The editions were created with Unicode fonts and according to TEI-compatible standards. Upon final update, anticipated to correspond with the publication of the print editions in 2022, the digital editions will be made available on the Hethitologie-Portal Mainz website under an Open Access, Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0) These will be searchable according to tools under development in the projects “Thesaurus Linguarum Hethaeorum digitalis” (DFG Sachbeihilfe, Project Number 437298794) and “Corpus der hethitischen Festrituale” (Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literature, Mainz).
Thematic studies
Reclassification of the internal structure of the Hittite Palace Administrative Corpus and a lexical study of administrative terms were undertaken. In addition, an extensive lexical and thematic commentary and analytic glossary were completed.
The thematic studies and text editions, along with an introduction to the present and historical models of the Hittite state and contextualizing studies on the Hittite vow economy and state income from diplomatic gifts and tribute will be combined into a book on Hittite administration, provisionally titled Hittite Economic Administration: Studies in the Palace-Temple Administrative Corpus Found at Ḫattuša to be published in the series Studien zu den Boğazköy-Texten in 2022.
