Ḫannaḫanna hold the King, the Queen and the Land of Ḫatti: Hittite Imaginary Landscape in Perspective

ROMINA DELLA CASA

Buenos Aires

Congreso; SBL International Meeting; 2015

SBL

The point of departure for the present analysis is the idea that landscape?understood as an intersection between a given society and the material environment that surrounds it?can be traced from different cultural manifestations, as in the Hattic-Hittite myths and rites. In these instances, specific areas of the Anatolian environment became places for attention and reflection?such as groves, vineyards, rivers, the under waters, the steppes and cities as well?of which different stories were narrated, and where important acts of the gods were believed to have occurred. The texts under analysis are known as the myths of the ?vanishing gods? or ?angry gods,? which narrate the actions developed by deities who suddenly became angry and left the Hittite world, as well as the practices carried out by other gods to change his/her state. In this regard, special consideration will be given to the myth of Hannahanna (CTH 334), a text dedicated to this Mother Goddess, a deity of wisdom, one among other deities of magic, who had the ability and the power to arbitrate in conflicts between the gods. For CTH 334 in particular, a comparative approach to the Anatolian texts will be developed, together with the study of grammatical features in the texts?e.g. the use of the Hitt. verb har- / hark- and Hitt. pre-verbs like "anda" or "sara" linked to different locations?, etymological observations, and the incorporation of theoretical notions from anthropological studies (mainly the concepts of ?ritual symbolism,? ?embodiment,? and ?symbolic redundancy?). All in all, the objective of the present study is to bring light to how the Hittites incorporated symbolic images of their landscape into their narratives.