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Hititte Mytological Texts

Head: Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Rieken
Project Staff: Dr. Jürgen Lorenz; Anna Bauer, M. A.; Dr. Susanne Görke; Felix Esser, M.A.

Short description: The mythological texts represent one of the most important and interesting sub-corpora of Hittite literature due to their subject matter and linguistic peculiarities. After almost 40 years of research into individual texts or text passages and various aspects, a new complete edition was considered an urgent desideratum. The aim of the project was to fill this gap by means of a new digital edition and to make the corpus availablein its entirety to a broad, interdisciplinary research public  with translation and philological commentary. This was done in cooperation with a project led by Prof. Dr. Gernot Wilhelm (Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg) and funded by the DFG, which ultimately aimed to digitize the entire Hittite corpus. A particular sustainability of the work was reached due to the publication method, as the computer files can always be kept up to date with the latest research even after the end of the project through additions with comparatively little effort. Two main areas of research within the project concern the linguistic investigation of the “epic-mythical style” and the identification of linguistic interferences due to language contact or as a result of the translation of texts from other languages.

Financing: The project was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG); May 2008 – April 2011.