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Das Ritual der Astu (CTH 490): Rekonstruktion und Tradition eines hurritisch-hethitischen Rituals aus Bogazköy/Hattusa. By Susanne Görke. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East, vol. 40. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Pp. xvii + 365. $179.
Susanne Görke's treatment of the ritual of A§tu (CTH 490) is the first text edition of a Hurro-Hittite text attempted since Erich Neu's 1996 work on the Hurro-Hittite Bilingual (Das hurritische Epos der Freilassung I, StBoT 32 [Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz]). Several versions of this multi-tablet ritual are known (see the various apparatuses on pp. 9-31). The majority of the tablets have been published in transcription in Corpus der hurritische Sprachdenkmäler 1/5 by Haas and Wegner, but the author was able to include six further fragments in her edition.
Working with the Hurrian material from Bogazköy is difficult, given the issues with the grammar and lexicon of this language that still remain. That being said, the advances in our ability to read Hurrian since the last decade of the twentieth century have allowed for a work such as the one under review to be attempted. The author has done a commendable job at trying to decipher the numerous Hurrian recitations within the A§tu ritual. As she has noted, however, of the Hurrian passages in the ritual, most cannot currently be completely translated (p. 293).
The book is divided into five sections. The author begins with a brief introduction to the ritual of A§tu, including a useful overview of past studies. The second part of the text makes up the majority of the book and contains the text apparatuses (§2.1) and the transcription, translation, and commentary on the four preserved tablets of the ritual and the various fragments that cannot yet be placed (§2.2). She also includes in this section a reconstruction of the ritual (§2.3), a comparison of its structure with other rituals (§2.3.2), and an examination of important ritual material (§2.3.3) and cult personnel (§2.3.4).
In her commentaries, while issues of Hittite grammar are discussed when needed, the author focuses primarily upon the Hurrian recitations. Her treatment of the Hurrian in the commentary includes a narrow transcription, an analytic bound transcription displaying morpheme boundaries that includes parenthetical notes on grammatical forms, a discussion of important /difficult words, and a translation when...