“Following a False Trail - The Search for the Hittites,”
al-Rāfidān. Journal of Western Asiatic Studies 27, pp. 101-116.
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The attempt of this paper is to reshape the concepts of 'culture' and 'ethnicity', questioning The attempt of this paper is to reshape the concepts of culture and ethnicity, questioning previous interpretations related to cultures labelled as 'Hittite' and 'Hurrian'.
Robinson starts asking which the best way could be to connect archaeology, philology and history with the aim of reconstruct a proper and verifiable concept of 'culture'. In the author's opinion, 'cultures' have been misled, because terms as 'Hittite', 'Hurrian' or 'Luwian' are “basically [...] labels [...] defined by language” (p. 101).
After an exposition of the main hypothesis about the origin of the Hittites (including that of C. Burney, based on E. Forrer's and E.H. Sturtevant's theories), the author then moves to another topic considered as a study case in the definition of 'culture': the identification of the city of Urkesh with Tell Mozan, based mostly on the discovery at this site of seal impressions of Tupkish, defined as 'king of Urkesh'. The author questioned the methodology behind this identification, because also a clear definition of 'Hurrian culture' in art and archaeology is still lacking (p. 106).
Robinson instead proposes that “the name 'Urkesh' itself is only a part of the titularity of a king, and not the name of an actual place, but the mythological home of the gods or a symbol of a spiritual core” (pp. 106-107).
The following sections are devoted to a re-discussion of the terms Hurrian and Subir/Subartu, stressing the concept that terms as 'Hurrian culture' must be based on an archaeological floor and not only on a philological background (pp. 107-109).
The last section of the paper (pp. 107-112) deals with a question about the meaning of Hittite culture and the influence of Hurrian features on the Hittite language and naming tradition (also a discussion about the king 'double name' is presented).
About the core concept of 'culture(s)' expressed by the author, a clear statement is given on p. 111: “The concept of historical culture is totally vacuous, and the entire historical and archaeological construction of the Ancient Near East are a house of cards on a island of quicksand. The answer to the central question of this study is that we have neither cultural continuity nor cultural discontinuity, because we have no legitimate cultures. We have failed to identify and study the numerous individual cultures that are contained within the large Ancient Near Eastern polities because we are fixated on false notions of culture and meaningless historical labels”.
[M. De Pietri – July 2019]