Tablets with the Song of Liberation | Credit: From Peter Neve, Die Oberstadt von Hattusa. Die Bauwerke, vol. I (Berlin: Mann, 1999)
Posted on 08/11/2019 2:05:24 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
The tablets containing the Song of Liberation were excavated in 1983 under a Byzantine period church in the Hittite capital city of Hattusha.
Writing for the July–October 2019 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, Eva von Dassow of the University of Minnesota reports on an intriguing, fictitious account of subjugation and liberation from Late Bronze Age Levant. The epic poem was originally composed in the Hurrian language, around 1600 B.C.E., but the surviving text comes from a Hurrian-Hittite bilingual edition from around 1400 B.C.E. It is recorded in cuneiform writing on a series of clay tablets, which came to light only in 1983, when they were excavated in the ancient Hittite capital city of Hattusha.
Bearing the original title “Song of Liberation [or Release],” this literary composition tells a story of the people from the city of Igingallish being held as captives in the neighboring Ebla. Intriguingly, the plot does not concern the fate of the subjugated as much as it does the deliberations of the Eblaites–about whether or not to release the captives. Also, the consequences considered in these deliberations are not so much about the people of Igingallish as they are about the Eblaites themselves. This is because a god (Hurrian storm deity Teshub) demands of the king of Ebla the release of the captives—promising prosperity to Ebla if it complies with his demand, and destruction if it doesn’t.
Megi, the king of Ebla, hears some strong language from Zazalla, the speaker of the senate of Ebla in this part of Song of Liberation. It is the climactic moment of the poem, which we cannot fully enjoy due to severe damage to this clay tablet.
(Excerpt) Read more at biblicalarchaeology.org ...
Tablets with the Song of Liberation | Credit: From Peter Neve, Die Oberstadt von Hattusa. Die Bauwerke, vol. I (Berlin: Mann, 1999)
What? T want that!
They left out the punchline?
Exactly!
Tve no idea what ‘liberation’ meant to thee people.
cuneiform has stood for a long time, our current systems are quite ethereal.
Most people don’t know what liberation is, sometimes it is a curse.
Yer on yer on...
I was just watching this PBS thing about “the summer of love”
It was all about liberation LOL
Boy oh boy did it collapse in a hurry.
own
Punch line: Trump’s Fault
:)
Yup, it was in use for a long time, including a long period of overlap with alphabetic systems. Last known one was something like 4th c AD.
Amazing there are still remnants.
The last line of the tablet before where it broke says: “Remember her? Try not to...”
Teshub:
Two things to watch out for -- number one, she pushes the "ancient Palestine" line of BS, and number two, the dating of the Luwians is based on the conventional pseudochronology, and is centuries too high.
Cuneiform writing on clay became wildly popular among the governing elites of the Ancient Near East. Although some societies, such as Egypt, only used cuneiform for their international correspondence, the Anatolians additionally adopted cuneiform for domestic use to write Hittite, Luwian, Hattic, and several other languages. But they also developed their own hieroglyphic script for inscriptions in Luwian only. Among other topics, this lecture explores where it came from, how widely it was used, and who could read it. Presented by Petra Goedegebuure, Associate Professor of Hittitology, Oriental Institute, University of Chicago.
Petra Goedegebuure | Luwian Hieroglyphs: An Indigenous Anatolian Syllabic Script from 3,500 Years Ago | The Oriental Institute | Published on February 11, 2016
Luwian Phoenician inscription:
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