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

Hittite prayers were at first heavily influenced by Babylonian and Hurrian prototypes, but soon developed their own creative style, highly emotional and rich in metaphors. The twenty-four prayers assembled in the volume cover the entire span of Hittite literary history. Paperback edition is available from the Society of Biblical Literature (www.sbl-site.org).

In Kanišite Hittite Alwin Kloekhorst offers a full account of the Hittite language spoken in Kaniš (Central Anatolia) during the kārum-period (ca. 1970-1710 BCE) by analysing the personal names of local individuals attested in Old Assyrian documents from there.

This book presents a comprehensive history of the Late Bronze Age kingdom of the Hittites, and the role it played within the context of the ancient Near Eastern world. From their capital, Hattusa, in central Anatolia, the Hittite kings ruled a vast network of subject territories and vassalstates reaching from the Aegean coast of Anatolia through Syria to the river Euphrates. In the fourteenth century BC the Hittites became the supreme political and military power in the Near East. How did they achieve their supremacy? How successful were they in maintaining it? What brought abouttheir collapse and disappearance? In seeking to answer these questions, the book begins with an account of the Hittites predecessors in Anatolia, particularly in the early centuries of the second millennium, traces the rise and development of the Hittite kingdom over a period of some five hundredyears, and ends with the events which followed in the wake of the kingdoms collapse. Translations from the original texts are a particular feature of the book; thus on many issues the Hittites and their contemporaries are allowed to speak to the modern reader for themselves.

The internationally renowned Assyriologist and linguist I. M. Diakonoff has gathered the work of Soviet historians in this survey of the earliest history of the ancient Near East, Central Asia, India, and China. Diakonoff and his colleagues, nearly all working within the general Marxist historiographic tradition, offer a comprehensive, accessible synthesis of historical knowledge from the beginnings of agriculture through the advent of the Iron Age and the Greek colonization in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea areas. Besides discussing features of Soviet historical scholarship of the ancient world, the essays treat the history of early Mesopotamia and the course of Pharaonic Egyptian civilization and developments in ancient India and China from the Bronze Age into the first millennium B.C. Additional chapters are concerned with the early history of Syria, Phoenicia, and Palestine, the Hittite civilization, the Creto-Mycenaean world, Homeric Greece, and the Phoenician and Greek colonization. This volume offers a unified perspective on early antiquity, focusing on the economic and social relations of production. Of immense value to specialists, the book will also appeal to general readers. I. M. Diakonoff is a senior research scholar of ancient history at the Institute of Oriental Studies, Leningrad Academy of Sciences. Philip L. Kohl is professor of anthropology at Wellesley College.

In dealing with a wide range of aspects of the life, activities, and customs of the Late Bronze Age Hittite world, this book complements the treatment of Hittite military and political history presented by the author in The Kingdom of the Hittites (OUP, 1998). It aims to convey to the reader a sense of what it was like to live amongst the people of the Hittite world, to participate in their celebrations, to share their crises, to meet them in the streets of the capital or in their homes, to experience the sights, sounds, and smells of a healing ritual, to attend an audience with the Great King, and to follow his progress in festival processions to the holy places of the Hittite land. Through quotations from the original sources and through the word pictures to which these give rise, the book aims at recreating, as far as is possible, the daily lives and experiences of a people who for a time became the supreme political and military power in the ancient Near East.

Translations from the original texts are a particular feature of the book. Thus on many issues the Hittites and their contemporaries are allowed to speak to the modern reader for themselves."--BOOK JACKET.