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Home > Magazines > Archaeology Odyssey > May/June 2001

City of Myth

In search of Hurrian Urkesh

By Giorgio Buccellati, Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati

The thousands of mid-second-millennium B.C. documents unearthed at Boghazkoy, Turkey, the site of the Hittite capital of Hattusha, include several collections of myths dealing with ancient heroes and gods. In the most important group of these myths, however, the heroes and gods are not Hittite; they are Hurrian, and their stories are set not in Anatolia but in Syro-Mesopotamia, where Hurrian-speaking people lived. These myths, the so-called Kumarbi Cycle, are Hittite translations of Hurrian stories. Some of them are even inscribed on bilingual tablets in both Hittite and Hurrian. 018 The Kumarbi Cycle consists of stories about one of […]

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Footnotes

1.

See E.C. Krupp,“Sacred Sex in the Hittite Temple of Yazilikaya,” AO 03:02.

2.

Most scholars believe that Hurrian and Urartian derive from a single language and that these two branches broke off sometime in the late fourth or early third millennium B.C.

3.

The Sumerian word for coppersmith, tabira, probably derives from the Hurrian tab-iri (“the one who has cast [copper]”). This may suggest the importance of the Hurrian ledge sites for access to natural resources in the north.

Endnotes

1.

Adapted from Harry A. Hoffner, Jr., trans., “Song of Silver,” in Hittite Myths (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), p. 49.

2.

Diana L. Stein, “Hurrians,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, ed. Eric. M. Meyers (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), vol. 3, p. 126.