Topics (move over topic to see place in topic list)
05 Scientific knowledge and scholarly lore
01 Religious and ideological doctrines and imagery
03 Religious festivals, cults, rituals and practices
03 Religious festivals, cults, rituals and practices
Keywords
Apsu
circle
gardens
Hittites
reed hut
rituals
Period
Hittite Empire
Neo-Assyrian Empire
Channel
Hittite culture
Text
The reed hut šutukku is a sacred structure erected in several Mesopotamian rituals (mis pî, bit rimki, foundation ritual, namburbi, substitute king ritual, etc.) and mentioned in various incantations (belonging or not to the rituals quoted here). Its name in Sumerian is É.GI.PAD. The reed structure É.kippa found in Hittite incantations and rituals may be a borrowing from the Mesopotamian structure. The phonetic changes can be explained and are not as such a major obstacle, but neither corpus (Hittite and Akkadian) yields many details about the use of these structures. We thus cannot conclude that the symbolism attached to the šutukku and the É.kippa was the same, even if their purposes seem quite similar.
Bibliography
Jean 2014
Jean, Cynthia. “Performing Rituals in Secluded Places. A Comparison of the Akkadian and Hittite Corpus.” In: Robert Rollinger and Erik van Dongen (eds.). Mesopotamia in the Ancient World. Impact, Continuities, Parallels. Melammu Symposia 7. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag 2014 (forthcoming).
Taracha 2001
Taracha, Piotr. “Hethitisch É.kippa- und das Sumerogramm (É.)GI.PAD mesopotamischer Texte.” Altorientalische Forschungen 28 (2001) 132-146. [De Gruyter (requires subscription)]
