The Lexical Text from Šapinuwa

Or 95/3 obverse; extract from Ura (plants). Photograph © Aygül Süel and Oguz Soysal, 2003.

Šapinuwa (Ortaköy), a city to the northeast of Hattuša , has yielded one lexical tablet (Or 95/3), a version of the thematic list MB Ura 10 with the list of plants. The text is laid out in two columns: Sumerian - Hittite, with occasional Akkadian glosses added to the Sumerian words. This particular format is not found in Hattuša or elsewhere.

Šapinuwa was a major Middle Hittite city where the Hittite king had one of his palaces. Few of the about 3,000 tablets and fragments that were found there in the nineteen nineties have been published so far. The Šapinuwa tablet is likely the oldest Hittite lexical tablet identified to date (first half of the fourteenth century).

Further reading

• Durnford, S.P.B., and J.R. Akeroyd 2005 Anatolian Maranshanha and the Many Uses of Fennel. Anatolian Studies 55: 1-13.
• Süel, Aygül, and Oguz Soysal 2003 A Practical Vocabulary from Ortaköy. Pp. 349-65 in Hittite Studies in Honor of Harry A. Hoffner Jr. on the Occasion of His 65^th Birthday, eds. Gary Beckman, Richard Beal and Gregory McMahon. Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns.
• Weeden, Mark 2011 Hittite Logograms and Hittite Scholarship. Studien zu den Boǧazköy-Texten 54. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, pp. 108-111.

Niek Veldhuis

Niek Veldhuis, 'The Lexical Text from Šapinuwa', Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts, The DCCLT Project, 2019 [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/dcclt/lexicallistsperiods/middlebabylonian/shapinuwa/]