Luwili: Luwian Religious Discourse Between Anatolia and Syria – Luwili

STEP ONE in Year One: Transliterating and translating Luwian cuneiform texts

The preliminary transliteration of Luwian cuneiform texts has to be checked. Joins should also be checked either through the online photographs of the tablets or, if possible, through the collation of the original tablets in the relevant museums. This task will be performed by Laura Puértolas Rubio under the supervision of Alice Mouton. Puértolas Rubio will also be in charge of creating a website which will comprise an online bibliographic database as an open source. Ilya Yakubovich will prepare a draft translation of the same corpus on the basis of the preliminary transliteration. Mouton will compile the catalogue of religious concepts in the corpus.

STEP TWO in Year Two: Writing the commentary

A commentary to the translated texts will be written by the three main project members. Yakubovich will be responsible for the linguistic part, whereas Mouton and Puértolas Rubio will deal with anthropology. The most spectacular results will be organized as research papers and submitted to peer-reviewed journals.

STEP THREE in the end of Year Two: Confronting the new data

The three main project members will circulate their preliminary transliterations and translations among the rest of the team, ahead of the Year Two conference. The other members of the team will be encouraged to present their questions and critics to the members of the core team in connection with these documents. They will also be invited to use them as starting points as they prepare their own papers for the conference. The latter will provide time to discuss every aspect of Luwian religious discourse and contrast the new findings with the comparable data of the neighbouring civilizations.

STEP FOUR in Year Three: Publication

The last year of the project will be devoted to editing the proceedings of the Year Two conference and integrating its findings into the paper and online editions of the Luwian cuneiform texts.

Laura Puértolas Rubio has collated 130 tablet fragments from the online photographs. To this amount, more than ten large original tablet fragments have been collated at the Istanbul museum in 2018. While Ilya Yakubovich was establishing a first thematic classification of the texts, Mouton used that new classification for studying palaeography. During the workshop organized by Mouton and Yakubovich in July 2019, Mouton presented the main results of this study. She discovered many indirect and direct joins, which contribute to the global understanding of the texts. Puértolas Rubio has regularly fed the Luwili website. She entered improved readings of fragments in the Morphy database, which was created by Yakubovich. This database was initially based on preliminary transliterations of all the Luwian religious texts. It has greatly evolved thanks to Luwili. It serves as a basis for another group of files created by Mouton; these files will be put online at the end of the project. They will constitute the complete text editions as an open source. All the files of the first group are ready; Mouton is currently finishing another group. Yakubovich has prepared a preliminary translation of all text fragments. Mouton has revised those translations on the basis of her collations. She has established a database of incantations in Hittite, which constitute the main comparatist corpus for Luwili. Thus, the second step is already quite advanced. Numerous analytic notes have already been redacted. Shared reflections between Yakubovich and Mouton have generated publications. The conference is planned in December 2019. The three main team members ready themselves to provide transliterations and translations of the Luwian religious texts to the other team members.

- Ilya Yakubovich has produced a new classification of all the texts relevant to the Luwili project. This new classification constitutes a significant progress, since it provides an unprecedented understanding of the corpus.
- Alice Mouton has discovered many indirect joints and two direct joints. These joints are an essential break through in the Luwili project : they contribute to the global understanding of the texts which were initially very fragmentary.

-Mouton, “Nommer les dieux hittites: au sujet de quelques épithètes divines”, invited paper given in the “Noms de dieux! Les dieux aux frontiers” seminar of the MAP ERC Program (Toulouse University, December 3, 2018)
-ead., “The gods in Luwian religious formulas: IInd-Ist mill. BCE”, invited paper given at the invitation of Masetti-Rouault in the “Between the Age of Diplomacy and the First Great Empire in Ancient West Asia” international conference (EPHE, April 18-19, 2019)
-ead., “Luwian Ritual Texts and Scribal Hands”, paper given in the Luwian in Cuneiform international workshop organized by Mouton and Yakubovich (Louvre, July 10, 2019)
-Puértolas Rubio, “How to Bewitch Someone: Bewitching techniques according to Incantations in the Hittite and Luwian Ritual Texts”, paper given at the 64e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale (Innsbruck University, July 16-20, 2018)
-ead., “How to Bewitch Someone II: Luwian Discourse about Witchcraft”, paper given at the invitation of Adiego in the ‘Luwic’ Dialects: Inheritance and Diffusion international workshop (Barcelona University, March 28-29, 2019)
-ead., “?May They Wash Their Mouths!': The Purification of the Mouth in Luwian Anti-Witchcraft Incantations”, paper given in the Luwian in Cuneiform international workshop
-Yakubovich, “The Luwian word for ‘place’ and its cognates”, Kadmos 56, 2017, 1-27
-id., “‘The Mighty Weapon of Tarhunt”, in Avetisyan, Dan and Grekyan (eds), Over the Mountains and Far Away, 2019, 544-559
-id., “Orthographic Variation and Relative Dating of Hittite-Luwian Texts”, paper given in the Luwian in Cuneiform international workshop
-Mouton and Yakubovich, “Internal or External Evil: A Merism in Luwian Incantations”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 82, 2019, 209-231
-eid., “irwalliya- parittarwaliya-: classification of the sources of evil in Luwian incantations”, paper given at the invitation of Adiego in the ‘Luwic’ Dialects international workshop

Luwian is a language of ancient Anatolia and Syria, which is attested in writing between 1500 and 700 BC. It belongs to the Anatolian group of the Indo-European family and thus represents a close relative of Hittite. It is attested in two scripts: Anatolian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform. The majority of Luwian cuneiform texts still lack cohesive translations, even though the meanings of most words are well known. This is due to the fact that these are mostly ritual incantations, the interpretation of which cannot be separated from the study of the respective ritual traditions and religious worldviews. In addition, there is no such thing as a uniform Luwian religion, but individual incantations rather reflect local traditions and discourse patterns of individual parts of Anatolia and northern Syria. The key to their understanding is comparing Luwian religious texts with similar compositions in other languages coming from the same areas.
The first aim of the Luwili project consists in publishing all the Luwian religious texts in cuneiform transmission that still remain without translation. According to the current consensus, these texts stem from the Hittite capital Hattusa itself as well as the areas known as Lower Land and Kizzuwatna in Hittite sources. The research methodology of the project consists in the systematic comparison of religious formulae attested in various languages but coming from the same microareas, with the goal of elucidating the structure of Luwian texts. Thanks to this philological inquiry, the Luwili project will try to determine the modalities of Luwian religious discourse through a detailed analysis of its communication strategies. This research will contribute to two different scientific fields at the same time. First, it will help the scholarly community to understand better the Luwian language, which will be useful to both Hittitologists and Indo-Europeanists. Second, it will contribute in a significant way to the history of religions, as it will facilitate scholarly access to a new corpus of religious texts and provide a thorough analysis of the religious discourse associated with this corpus.
The second aim of the proposed research program consists in studying Luwian religious discourse from the comparative and anthropological perspectives in order to define the cultural and linguistic specificities of each Luwian religious tradition of Anatolia and Syria. For doing so, all the project members will gather around a conference that will be held in the end of the second year of the project, exchanging views on the ways Luwian religious discourse interacted with that of the neighbouring languages. The results of the Luwili project will be a commented edition of Luwian cuneiform texts and proceedings of the year two conference, published as two separate volumes. The edition of the Luwian texts will also be published as an open source in the Hethitologie Portal Mainz website.