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Die Ahhijawa-Frage, mit einer kommentierten Bibliographie. By ROBERT FISCHER. Dresdner Beiträge zur Hethitologie, vol. 26. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2010. Pp. vii + 125. euro29.80 (paper).
Robert Fischer's Die Ahhijawa-Frage, an adaptation of the author's master's thesis, is a short historiographical overview of the decades of scholarship devoted to the Hittite place name "Ahhiyawa" or "Ahhiya": Emil Forrer first proposed in 1924 that this "Ahhiyawa" was in fact the Homeric ??a?a, or Greece. Forrer' s assertion provoked an intense debate, which - although most Hittitologists now agree that the people of Ahhiyawa were likely the Mycenaean Greeks - lasts to this day. The connection to the classical world has drawn the attention of many scholars, and given rise to publications on related linguistic, geographical, historical, and archaeological phenomena. In Fischer's introduction he professes the goal of providing an account of the controversy surrounding the problem, and the long search for a solution, without judgment or evaluation.
The book is first divided into his analysis (pp. 1-66) and an annotated bibliography (pp. 69-1 24); the analysis is further broken up into eight short chapters. In chapters 1 and 2, "Forschung, Literatur, Kontroverse" and "Einiges aus dem Umfeld der Ahhijawa- Frage," Fischer outlines the Ahhiyawa question, its primary difficulties, and the origins of the feud, summarizing Forrer' s initial publications and Ferdinand Sommer's very negative response. In chapter 3, "Wo liegt Ahhijawa?" he continues chronologically, addressing scholars' subsequent attempts to locate Ahhiyawa either in Greece or in some place emphatically not Greece. Chapter 4, "Historischer...