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This chapter poses the question of whether or not the “companion volume” that Eliade promised in Patterns in Comparative Religions can be identified with “the awkward, multi-volume, unfinished production of Eliade’s last years,” A History of Religious Ideas. It argues that Eliade thought it so, or came to think it so. The History functions—and will continue to function—in a way analogous to an encyclopedia, providing a valuable starting point for further inquiries, one that is provocative of both thought and questions. But despite Eliade’s identification of the History with the “companion volume,” it fails to reflect explicitly on the relations between the morphological approach, as exemplified in Patterns, and a historical approach, as illustrated by the History. In part, this is due to the lack of the concluding volume to the History, Eliade’s growing problems with his health, and, finally, his death; but it is also due to the inadequate conceptualization of the historical embodied in the work.

Discussion of what the term ‘Hatti’, originally used of the Hittite empire, means in the Iron Ages sources which refer to it provides the first section of this chapter, and leads on to a more general survey of the political structure of Syria during the period of the Neo-Hittite kingdoms. That leads further to a consideration of who actually constituted the populations of these kingdoms. The general assumption that they were by and large the descendants of refugees from the Late Bronze Age Hittite world is questioned, and alternative possibilities are suggested. The chapter ends with a discussion of the emergence of the royal dynasties in the Neo-Hittite kingdoms and their possible links with Bronze Age Hittite royalty.

An advantage of the h₂e-conjugation theory over the ‘perfect theory’ is that it permits a natural explanation for the numerous Hittite hi-verbs built to suffixed stems. This chapter studies one such family of forms, the ‘i-presents’, characterized by an apophonically invariant stem-final element *-i-. Several subtypes are identified.

This chapter discusses the inadequacy of other theories for explaining the similarities between the Covenant Code and the Laws of Hammurabi, including coincidence, the use of common scribal techniques, oral tradition, oral transmission of Hammurabi's text, and the use of an unknown mediating Northwest Semitic/Canaanite text. The chapter outlines in detail the evidence for placing the composition of the Covenant Code in the Neo-Assyrian period, between 740–640 BCE and the opportunity for the use of Hammurabi's Laws. It also discusses the wide attestation of the Laws of Hammurabi as a canonical-scribal text in the Neo-Assyrian period. It discusses the Covenant Code's occasional use of laws from other cuneiform law collections and the attestation of these other collections.

The dethronement is traced of Sanskrit from its initial position as the original proto-language of all the Indo-Europeans in the opinion of the early linguists to its ongoing diminishing status as a secondary language containing a number of linguistic features that are considered to be more recent than those of other Indo-European cognate languages. The chapter has two main sections. The first looks at the law of the palatals (the primary linguistic formula arrived at by the comparative method that shattered Sanskrit’s pre-eminent status) and the discovery of the laryngeals in Hittite (based on an examination of Hittite documents in Anatolia). The second discusses linguistic objections from India (mainly from Satya Swarup Misra).

Oliver Robert Gurney's long career in Hittite studies spanned the greater part of the existence of this academic subject. He was a man of the greatest courtesy and integrity. A natural reserve might make him appear aloof at first, but behind that lay a warm and humorous personality. He served as president of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara. He also served as member of Council for the British School of Archaeology in Iraq for many years. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1959. He became Foreign Member of the Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters in 1976 and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Higher Letters in the University of Chicago in 1991. He was Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford from 1963, and was also a Freeman in the City of Norwich.

One of the enduring images in the Torah’s is that of Moses the recipient of divine laws at Mt. Sinai. Early 19th-century scholarship rejected this scenario. One reason was the belief that writing was not sufficiently developed. In recent decades the history of the Canaanite/Hebrew linear alphabet or Proto-Sinaitic script has been clarified and is known to have originated centuries before the time of Moses. In the 1950s, George Mendenhall noticed that there were similarities in the form of ancient Hittite treaties of the 2nd millennium B.C. and the Sinai legislation of Exodus 20ff. It is shown that the six-part 2nd millennium B.C. treaties are structurally closer to the Exodus 20ff and the book of Deuteronomy than the simple four-point outline of Assyrian and Aramean treaty formula of the 1^st millennium that some scholars have suggested are analogous to the structure of the Torah’s law codes.

This chapter argues that the biblical laws of theft and burglary are excellent illustrations of the need to read biblical law narratively and not semantically. The biblical laws of theft take an objective approach to the question of “who is a thief” by applying objective tests of hot possession and lukewarm possession. These tests are shown to apply both in biblical law and biblical narratives (e.g., the Jacob story and the Joseph cycle). There is a risk that objective tests could lead to individual acts of injustice (as in the Joseph narratives), although the possibility of admitting evidence that would acquit the innocent should not be discounted (cf. the Laws of Hammurabi). Elsewhere in the Bible, the biblical laws of theft are used to expose King David's offences against Uriah the Hittite (which involve murder and adultery). Their use in this context emphasizes the creativity and didacticism of biblical law.

This raises the fundamental question of what happened to the populations of the Hittite world after the collapse of the Hittite kingdom at the end of the Bronze Age. It sets the scene for discussion of the Neo-Hittite kingdoms which emerged in the Iron Age and their links with their Bronze Age predecessors. It also foreshadows discussion of the common assumption of widespread population movements at the end of the Hittite era. More generally, the Introduction indicates the scope of the book’s coverage, over the first four centuries of the Iron Age, and the range of foreign peoples and kingdoms that interacted with the Neo-Hittites throughout this period.

The chapter begins with a reconstruction of events surrounding the evacuation of the Hittite capital Hattusa by its elite population, including the royal family, and proceeds to a discussion of the circumstances which led to the collapse of the empire. It discusses the complex mix of peoples who were the inhabitants of the empire at the time of its collapse, and the wide range of languages which they spoke. The Luwian language, most visibly represented in hieroglyphs on large monuments, is a particular focus of attention, since it became the language used by Hittite royalty in its public declarations, and was henceforth the language of royalty in the Neo-Hittite kingdoms. The reasons for its prominence in both eras are discussed in some detail.

There is much emphasis in this and in the following chapter on the enterprises of Neo-Assyrian kings in regions west of the Euphrates, and the substantial role many of these kings played in the shaping of the history of the Neo-Hittite kingdoms. This undoubtedly reflects the historical realities of the period as Assyrian power spread relentlessly westwards. But it also reflects the fact that most of our written sources for the period are Assyrian, and inevitably contain a strong Assyrian bias in the presentation of events. The historical narrative begins with the western campaign of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II (883–859), followed by the more substantial campaigns of his son and successor Shalmaneser III. The chapter ends with the western campaigns of Adad-nirari III (810–783). Throughout this period, we see the involvement of various Neo-Hittite kingdoms in the conflicts fought by the trans-Euphrates peoples and kingdoms against Assyrian aggression, often through military coalitions.

The absorption of the last of the Neo-Hittite kingdoms into the Assyrian provincial system in the late 8th century marked the end of the history of the Neo-Hittite world. But not the end of all the states that had belonged to this world. Some of them, like Adanawa and Malatya, made new bids for independence in the following century. Even after this, the legacy of the Hittites lived on in the retention of the name Hatti for a large part of the region where the Late Bronze Age kingdom had held sway, and where a number of its successors had developed and for a time flourished. Elements of the Hittite imperial legacy survived for many centuries after the last Late Bronze Age king Suppiluliuma II had departed his capital Hattusa for the last time.

The citadel with which the name Troy is associated lies in the north-west corner of Anatolia in the region called the Troad, so named by Graeco-Roman writers who believed that the whole area was controlled by Troy. For almost 3,000 years, the story of the Trojan War pitting the Trojans against the Greeks has provided one of the western world's richest sources of inspiration in the realms of art and literature. However, the question remains: did the Trojan War really happen? This chapter considers possible Anatolian sources on Troy including Hittite texts, the discovery of a bronze seal bearing a brief inscription in Luwian hieroglyphs during excavations in 1995, Troy's role in Anatolian Affairs, Troy VIh as the more likely candidate for Homeric Troy, and the making of Homer's epic Iliad.

The tablet collections discovered in the Hittite capital are the largest collections of cuneiform texts in the Hittite language. In this paper the organization of the Hittite tablet collections will be examined on the basis of internal and external factors, i.e. colophons, labels, and catalogues. In particular, catalogues are not exhaustive lists of texts, but inventories of texts that were intended to be preserved for a longer period of time, and which were therefore continuously monitored and copied, and, in the course of time, reworked in various ways. Finally, collections management allows some reflections on genres of texts collected, copying practices, and typology of text collection (libraries or archives).

After Tutankhamun's death, the queen wanted a husband to make him the successor of Tutankhamun's throne. She wrote to Shuppiluliumash to beg him to give her one of his sons, and promised to make him a king of Egypt. Shuppiluliumash wondered whether the letter was some kind of trick to deliver a Hittite prince into Egyptian hands and then to turn him into a hostage. With a doubt on the back of his mind, Shuppiluliumash sent one of their princes, Zananzash, as a response to the Egyptian queen's request. But Zananzash died without knowing the real cause of his death, and they do not even know where his death occurred. In the legal view of Hittie, Zananzash was assassinated by opposition who were against with the idea of an Egyptian court in handling the throne to a foreigner.

Chapter 9 explores the impact of Persian religion on Anatolia and the Caucasus and the means by which the Orontids, Artaxiads, Pharnabazids, Mithradatids and Ariarathids engaged ancient Persian royal traditions while cultivating pre-Persian cults.