In search of a distant past: forms of historical consciousness in Hittite Anatolia

Year 2018, Issue: 44, 1 - 23, 01.01.2018

Amir Gılan

https://doi.org/10.1501/andl_0000000448

Abstract

The Hittites of the Old Hittite kingdom could only look back on a relatively short past. With time, however, the kingdom ‘without a past’ could finally look back and relate to a distant past of its own. The following paper will survey some of ways the Hittites came into contact, imagined, and represented their distant past. Hittite historiography, one of the most elaborate and highly developed traditions of its kind in the ancient Near East, was mainly concerned with contemporary history and only marginally engaged with the distant past. The more distant past was the subject of literature rather than of historiography. Both in the form of translated Mesopotamian literature or in local compositions. But it was in ritual action, as documented in the ‘Offering Lists’, that long sequences of past names were preserved and performed, constituting a historical scaffold spanning from the earliest phases of the Old Kingdom to the Empire period. The Old Hittite Kingdom began as a ‘Kingdom without a past’, but with time, the Hittites began to relate and to utilize a distant, sometimes even glorious past of, of their own.

Keywords

Hittites, Forms of Historical Consciousness, Anatolia

References

• Ankara Üniversitesi - Ankara Anadolu (Anatolia) Dergisi