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Digital Philological Edition of the Hittite Hymns and Prayers (CTH 371-389) and Linguistic Research

 The hymns and prayers represent one of the most important and interesting sub-corpora of Hittite writing due to their truth-oriented presentation, on the one hand, and their linguistic and literary peculiarities, being an argumentative and persuasive text type with performative elements, on the other. The project pursues two goals:

1)      A complete digital edition of the corpus (including a new translation and philological commentary) based on the current state of research for a broad, interdisciplinary research public (cooperation with the “Hethitologie-Portal Mainz”, a project for the digitization of the entire Hittite text corpus. 

2) On the basis of the newly compiled edition, the linguistic study of the Hittite hymns and prayers regards the text-type-specific features of the genre, which has so far been little studied across disciplines. The aim is to use the methods provided by text-linguistic research of modern languages to arrive at an adequate and precise description of the micro- and macrostructure and thus to arrive at a more precise typological delimitation of the genre as a whole.

Funding: The project was funded bei the German Research Foundation (DFG); October 1, 2011 – September 30, 2014.

Project Staff:

Dr. Jürgen Lorenz

Alexandra Daues, M.A.
Sandra Herrmann, B.A.
Benedikt Naglik, B.A.