The Hurrians represented one of the most important civilisations in the Ancient Near East between the III and II millennia BC. Their culture has passed down to us almost exclusively in the form of written documents. Thousands of cuneiform clay tablets, discovered in various sites in Mesopotamia, Egypt and Anatolia, tell us of the history, literature, religious beliefs and judicial and economic principles of this people, whose rich culture embraced a wide horizon, from north-eastern Iraq as far as south-eastern Anatolia. The aim of the research project "Corpus der hurritischen Sprachdenkmäler", organised by the ICEVO and, since 1984, operating in conjunction with the German universities of Berlin and Würzburg as well as the University of Trieste, is that of providing the international community of scholars with this precious epigraphic information in the form of text transcriptions accompanied by complete glossaries. To date, 10 volumes containing 770 texts and fragments have been published and, for the year 2004, we plan to complete the work with two further volumes dealing with the most numerous body of texts, i.e. the Hurrian documents from the archives of the Hittite capital Hattusa, in central Anatolia. Texts from other archives of the Ancient Near East will shortly be published in three further volumes.
This work comes under the research activity "Study of the Civilisations of Anatolia and the Near East in the II millennium BC" (1.6.04) being conducted by ICEVO. Based on careful philological analysis of the Hurrian texts, it furnishes a firm textual basis for studies on the history, language and cultural traditions of the Hurrian people and their contribution to the civilization of Ancient Near East. Moreover, it provides valuable material also for scholars of ancient history, linguistics and the history of religions. One need only recall, for example, the way in which some Hurrian poems represent forerunners of the famous Greek epics such as the Iliad of Homer or the Theogony of Hesiod.
The importance of the research activity relating to the corpus of Hurrian texts emerges clearly from the long-standing collaboration between the Institute's researchers and scholars from the German universities of Berlin and Würzburg. We must, in fact, not forget that the Institute's scholars are highly specialised in Hurrian studies, a discipline not taught in Italian universities, and play a leading role in this field on an international level.
In order to work on the corpus texts, a specific computer program has been developed, GHISA (= Hurrian-Hittite-Sumerian-Akkadian Glossary), which enables us to create complex glossaries of all text groups. The continuing computerisation of all Hurrian epigraphic material will result in a thesaurus of the language as well as the availability on-line of all Hurrian texts, in order to make the access to this textual material both easier and far more rapid.
Financing: ordinary endowments
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