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The Power of Human Speech in Hittite Anatolia

Performance and Performativity of Telipinu’s mugawar (CTH 324)

  • Romina Della Casa EMAIL logo

Abstract

With the aim of improving our understanding of how Hittite practitioners in ancient Anatolia used human speech to achieve a desired efficacy or performativity (and therefore change a current situation), this paper explores the ritual character of Telipinu’s mugawar (CTH 324) and its historiola. Along these lines, it examines what traces of human agency are present in the text, and under which circumstances its performance would have been most valuable. Considered from a broader perspective, this study also aims to link Hittite texts to the lives of Anatolia’s inhabitants and to the many ways they did things with words.

Acknowledgements

The author is a post-doctoral fellow at the Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University (2019–2021). I am especially grateful to Amir Gilan for helping me improve the original manuscript and for the fruitful discussions, and to Stefano de Martino for his advice on previous versions of it. I would also like to thank the anonymous evaluator for the valuable comments and helpful feedback. This being said, it should be noted that I alone bear all the responsibility for the content of this paper and the conclusions presented above.

Abbreviations

Bibliographical abbreviations follow those of the Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archäologie.

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Published Online: 2021-06-12
Published in Print: 2021-06-08

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