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Charles W. Steitler: The Solar Deities of Bronze Age Anatolia. Studies in Texts of the Early Hittite Kingdom. (Studien zu den Boğazköy-Texten, 62.) xx, 605 pp. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2017. €98. ISBN 978 3 447 10798 3.
Among the approximately 3,000 references to Solar deities in Hittite texts, 100 belong to Old Hittite (= OH) and 400 to Middle Hittite (= MH) sources (p. 8). Steitler arranges his study using a strictly chronological approach: OH (chs 4–6) and MH (chs 8–10) sources on the Sun goddess (of Arinna), the male Sun god and the Sun goddess of the earth, also taking into account local solar deities (ch. 7) and concluding with a section on kingship and solar deities (ch. 11). He thus substantially increases our knowledge compared to earlier studies by Daisuke Yoshida and Ulrike Lorenz-Link.
One strength of the book is the precise description of different solar deities according to their historical development, resulting from the re-arrangement and new edition of a number of texts (CTH 339.1; 339.2; 339.3; 634.3; 736; 764.1; 820.4; 820.5) and also including some new philological insights. The following are worthy of mention: the element -šemu of the Hattian divine name Wurunšemu (pp. 59–64) is neither related to a word for “mother” nor to Hittite “šepa” (“genius”), but the goddess's name must be analysed as “the earth (wur = un), its (še-) mu” with unknown semantics of mu. The Hittite word šiu- (and šiw(a)- in...