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.

Volume 24 of the Israel Oriental Studies Annual includes eight articles. The Ancient Near Eastern section consists of five articles. Four deal with Hittite and Anatolian subjects (Burgin, Gilan, Cohen and Hawkins); one discusses the “Laws of Hazor” text fragment and its relationship to other cuneiform law collections (Darabi). The Semitic section includes three articles. The first is the second instalment of Etymogical Investigations on Jibbali/Śḥerέt Anthroponyms (Castagna and Al-'amri). The second article is a discussion of the relationship between Ethiopian Semitic languages and ancient Egyptian (Cerqueglini). Sealing the Semitic section and volume 24 is a study of spoken Ashkenazic Hebrew among Hassidic communities (Yampolskaya et al.).

The topic of the Anatolian panthea in the Bronze Age deals with Hattian, Hittite, Palaean, Luwian and Hurrian gods who have been worshiped in the Kingdom of Ḫatti. In such a context, along with trying to keep a balanced and methodologically-aware approach in our original research, we realized that a multi-authored work such as the present volume, with papers written by some of the major experts of Anatolian religious history, would represent an invaluable contribution to the advancement of a complex and vast field. This collection of essays is the result of the workshop Theonyms, Panthea and Syncretisms in Hittite Anatolia and Northern Syria, held at the University of Verona on 25th and 26th March 2022. Colleagues with different areas of expertise pertaining to the topic of Anatolian religions contributed to an extremely successful event.

Known from the Old Testament as one of the tribes occupying the Promised Land, the Hittities were in reality a powerful neighbouring kingdom: highly advanced in political organization, administration of justice and military genius; with a literature inscribed in cuneiform writing on clay tablets; and with a rugged and individual figurative art ... Newly revised and updated, this classic account reconstructs a complete and balanced picture of Hittite civilization, using both established and more recent sources.

This book reconsiders the concept of empire and examines the processes of imperial making and undoing in Hittite Anatolia (c. 1600-1180 BCE).

This book investigates the founding and building of cities in the ancient Near East. The creation of new cities was imagined as an ideological project or a divine intervention in the political narratives and mythologies of Near Eastern cultures, often masking the complex processes behind the social production of urban space. During the Early Iron Age (c.1200–850 BCE), Assyrian and Syro-Hittite rulers developed a highly performative official discourse that revolved around constructing cities, cultivating landscapes, building watercourses, erecting monuments and initiating public festivals. This volume combs through archaeological, epigraphic, visual, architectural and environmental evidence to tell the story of a region from the perspective of its spatial practices, landscape history and architectural technologies. It argues that the cultural processes of the making of urban spaces shape collective memory and identity as well as sites of political performance and state spectacle.

This book takes a bold new approach to the prehistory of Homeric epic, arguing for a fresh understanding of how Near Eastern influence worked.

This book describes ten different government archives of cuneiform tablets from Assyria, using them to analyze the social and economic character of the Middle Assyrian state, as well as the roles and practices of writing. The tablets, many of which have not been edited or translated, were excavated at the capital, Assur, and in the provinces, and they give vivid details to illuminate issues such as offerings to the national shrine, the economy and political role of elite households, palace etiquette, and state-run agriculture. This book concentrates particularly on how the Assyrian use of written documentation affected the nature and ethos of government, and compares this to contemporary practices in other palatial administrations at Nuzi, Alalah, Ugarit, and in Greece.

The first comprehensive overview of the development of literacy, script usage, and literature in Hittite Anatolia (1650-1200 BC).

This book presents the results of the survey conducted by the University of Florence, in the years 2008-2012, at the site and in the surrounding territory of Uşaklı Höyük on the central Anatolian plateau in Turkey. Geological, geomorphological, topographic and geophysical research have provided new information and data relating to the environment and the settlement landscape, as well as producing new maps of the area and indicating the presence of large buried buildings on the site. Analysis of the rich corpus of pottery collected from the surface indicates that the site and its territory were continuously settled from the late Early Bronze Age through the Iron Age and down to the Late Roman and Byzantine periods. A few fragments of cuneiform tablets with Hittite texts, a sealing with two impressions of a stamp seal, and pottery stamps illustrate the importance of Uşaklı Höyük and support the hypothesis of its identification with the town of Zippalanda, known from the Hittite sources as a seat of the cult of the Storm God.