Since singing an established composition implies reproducing relatively fixed wording often coordinated to music with a rhythmic and perhaps a melodic pattern, the first place to look for poetry among the tablets of the Hittites is in those texts labeled ‘‘song’’ - Hittite ishamai-, Sumerographic SIR (Guterbock 1978: 232-3; Hoffner 1998a: 66), and those said to be ‘‘sung’’ (ishamiya-, ‘‘to sing,’’ Akkadographic ZAMJGRU; note also ishamatalla-, ‘‘singer’’). Indeed, the etymological kinship of this family of words with ishiya-, ‘‘to tie, bind’’ (Puhvel 1984-: 2.394-5) betrays its association with ‘‘bound’’ language.
Songs attested in the Hittite archives (de Martino 1995: 2662-3) include the brief ‘‘Song of the war-god’’ (Beckman 1995b: 25, rev. lines 14-15) and ‘‘Clothes of Nesa’’ (Soysal 1987: 181), as well as the more substantial myths of the Kumarbi Cycle (see below, section 4.1) and the Hurro-Hittite bilingual ‘‘Song of Release’’ (section 4.2). Particularly intriguing is the Luwian ‘‘Wilusiad’’ (Watkins 1995: 146-9), which might have presented an Anatolian analogue to the Homeric Iliad. Unfortunately, this composition is known only from its incipit: ‘‘When they came fTom steep Wilusa [= Troy?].’’ Neither hymns and prayers (Singer 2002) nor antiphonal chants employed in worship need detain us here where we are concerned solely with ‘‘epic.’’
The difficulties in even recognizing, let alone analyzing, verse in the cuneiform texts of Hatti are substantial (Carruba 1998: 67-9): the cuneiform script was not well adapted for the precise rendering of the phonology of Indo-European languages, the scribes made liberal use of ideograms that mask underlying words, and furthermore they failed to indicate breaks between lines of poetry through punctuation or line division. Nonetheless, patient study of the Old Hittite song ‘‘Clothes of Nesa’’ has revealed some of the basic principles of meter and stress employed in Hittite poetry (Melchert 1998; see also the pioneering work of McNeill 1963, Durnford 1971, and Eichner 1993). In this dirge, at least, each line consists of equal lines of four stresses, divisible into two cola:
Nesas waspus Nesas waspus // tiya-mu tiya nu=mu annas=mas kattan arnut // tiya=mu ti'ya nu=mu tiwas=mas kattan arnut // ti'ya=mu ti'ya
Clothes of Nesa, clothes of Nesa - bind on me, bind!
Bury me down with my mother - bind on me, bind!
Bury me down with my nurse(?) - bind on me, bind!
Unfortunately, it has not been possible to detect this or any other pattern employed consistently in the longer Hittite-language songs (Guterbock 1951: 141-4). Indeed, it may be the case that verse was used only sporadically in these texts, perhaps in order to highlight dramatic moments in the exposition (Carruba 1998: 84-7). However, the songs do share certain other stylistic features (de Vries 1967), such as the use of a small number of set scenes (the departure of a messenger, the preparation of a banquet, a father’s recognition of parentage and bestowal of a name upon a child (Hoffner 1968)), the verbatim repetition of messages, and the introduction of speech by a formula restricted to literary contexts (memiskiuwan dais, ‘‘began to speak’’). Each composition also seemingly begins with a formal proemium, although this section has been badly damaged or lost in several instances.
For Luwian and Hattic verse, see Eichner 1993: section 3 and section 7, respectively, and for our scant knowledge of Hurrian verse, consult Neu 1988: 246-8.
World History
