Article

Name: Hittite poetic meter: half a century of research

Authors: M. A. Molina

Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Abstract: The paper discusses previous research of the Hittite poetic meter, emerged since 1951 when H. Güterbock wrote that so called Song of Ullikumi (Kumarbi cycle) does have a regular meter. He suggested also that Hittite poetry was organized on the count of accent (tonic nature of poetry), and that it demonstrated the same style as Akkadian and Sumerian poetry: four stresses and two cola per line. He came out with the idea that a poetic line coincide with a clause in Hittite texts; that all of the texts were written as a prosaic ones, in a row, without any separation of poetic lines. Unfortunately, the following researchers took his words for granted and started searching for the ways to comply with the “Mesopotamian tradition”. Analyses were carried out using the material of the Song of Ullikumi, some other texts from the Kumarbi cycle and other texts marked with a logogram SÌR (hitt. išḫamaiš, meaning ‘song’), in the direction of determining the words that were unstressed, in order to make it 4 stresses per line (clause). No comprehensive statistical analysis, though, had been provided for the Hittite poetry: all the reports were dealing with a limited amount of clauses from the Song of Ullikumi or the Song of Nesa. Most researchers, among them prominent Hittitologists, such as S. P. Durnford and H. C. Melchert, would discuss possible lack of stress in clauses on the basis of their arbitrary opinion of what kinds of words could be united into one stress unit with another word (e.g. dependent noun genitive with its head noun). Obviously, one could find almost anything needed with this approach. Our own preliminary analysis of stresses in Ullikumi has demonstrated that only 30 % of its text might yield 4 stresses per line, which is indeed too little to call it a verse. The review discusses the lack and the necessity of a proper statistical analysis on the corpus that would include all the allegedly poetic texts of Hittite tradition. The authors have argued that available evidence, contra previous research, cannot suggest any stress loss/reduction, and that in order to separate the Hittite poetry from the Hittite prose, and to determine the principles of the Hittite poetic meter one should provide different evidence using corpus and statistical methods, and analyzing the very basics of versification in Hittite, e.g., the principles of line separation.

Keywords: Hittite, poetry, meter, verse, rhythm, prose

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