Welcome to Part Seven of the project “Interviewing Religion,” where I interview scholars of Middle Eastern religions about their research, discuss how their work connects to broader public issues, and ask for suggestions for further reading. [You can read the other interviews here!] A huge thank you to the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Luce Foundation, who supported my work with one of their Advancing Public Scholarship Grants. I couldn’t have launched this project without their assistance.
For my seventh interview, I’m excited to introduce Dr. Gary Beckman. Beckman is the George G. Cameron Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Civilization and Languages and Civilizations at the University of Michigan. He has published widely on Hittite religion and on Hittite social organization and diplomacy, and recently completed an edition of the tablets and fragments of the Epic of Gilgamesh recovered from the site of the Hittite capital Hattusa. His current research focuses on the reception and adaptation of Syro-Mesopotamian culture by the Hittites. On a personal note, Beckman’s class Peoples of the Middle East was one of my first forays into the region, helping launch my interest in the Middle East and leading to my career in Near Eastern and Islamic Studies. I’m thrilled to feature him in this project.
I recently spoke to Beckman, who graciously answered a few questions about his research and publications. I encourage you to read his work and check out the many resources he mentions here.
1) How did you first get interested in studying Hittite religion?
Beckman: Believe it or not, when I was about 8 years of age, I read a book entitled The Secret of the Hittites by C. W. Ceram (translated from the German original Enge Schlucht und Schwarzer Berg) and decided that this was so interesting that I would become an archaeologist and study the Hittites. Though, to be honest, at that time I just thought an archaeologist was somebody who studied things long ago and read texts in funny languages.
Then, in junior high school and high school, I wanted to be a journalist. I worked on the school newspaper but decided ultimately that that was boring. Of course, you don’t have many interesting things to write about at that point anyway. They didn’t let you write about things that might be controversial.
So, when I went to college, I said I’m going to be an archaeologist again. “I remember the Hittites, I think I’m going to do that.” At that time, however, there was no way for me to study an ancient Near Eastern language other than Hebrew, so I majored in Classics. I majored in Greek and Hebrew, took a course in Aramaic, and then went to graduate school at Yale, where I specifically applied to study the Hittites.
When my teacher at Yale, Harry Hoffner, switched to the University of Chicago, I went to Germany for a couple of years — the homeland of Cuneiform Studies. I got my degree from Yale, but finished up my work in Marburg with Heinrich Otten who was the epigrapher for the Boğazkale excavations of Hattusa, the Hittite capital.
2) You’ve been asked to present your work at a local community center. How would you describe your research on Hittite culture and practices, as well as your work on the Epic of Gilgamesh?
Beckman: I am particularly interested in the reception of Mesopotamian (Babylonian and Assyrian) culture by the Anatolian Hittites. This phenomenon was particularly intense because in borrowing the cuneiform writing system, the Hittites also adopted numerous features of Mesopotamian civilization, particularly in the area of religion. The Epic of Gilgamesh, which was re-told in a Hittite-language text, is a prime example of this influence.
What is the Epic of Gilgamesh? It’s the story of a guy named Gilgamesh, the offspring of a goddess and a human king. Gilgamesh becomes the king of the city of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia sometime in the third Millennium. He’s in this Age of Heroes, the beginning of time in the text. Gilgamesh undertakes a series of quests, fighting and then befriending the wild man Enkidu, whom the Gods later slay in anger, forcing Gilgamesh to question his own identity and actions. These tales are built within a broader frame narrative, as the epic’s prologue and conclusion summon the reader to admire the wonders of Uruk: its incredible temple, vineyards, and so on. It’s a very sophisticated text.
The Epic of Gilgamesh relates to the Hittites in that they used it for scholarly purposes, I think. There are several versions of this epic. The classical 12-tablet version was compiled in Babylonia and Assyria. What you read in the Penguin edition of the epic or in a world literature course is this 12-tablet version, which is in a kind of literary Akkadian. Then we have a fragmentary text in the Hurrian language which we can hardly understand. The Hurrian tablets about Gilgamesh are broken in such a way that we have hardly any complete sentences. We know they are about Gilgamesh though because of the personal names in them, the same characters that appear in other versions.
And finally, there is a Hittite rendering of the epic, which is in probably three big tablets but is preserved in fragments, as are most Hittite texts. Many, but not all elements of the 12-tablet version are found in the Hittite text. They leave out a lot about the kingdom of Uruk, for example, but expand a part about the cedar forest which they consider to be Syria right next to them.
3) Tell me about your recent projects and publications. Which works are your favorites and why?
Beckman: The Hittite Gilgamesh is my favorite because it allows us to see how a classic of Mesopotamia was reworked to fit the interests of a peripheral civilization. I just published an edition of the Epic of Gilgamesh, using material from the Hurrian language and the Mesopotamian and Hittite sources. What I wanted to do was to make a readable translation of the Hittite version for comparison to the Mesopotamian one.
I’ve also produced a full edition of the babilili-ritual from Hattusa. Babalili is the Hittite word for “in Babylonian.” This text is not written entirely in Akkadian, it’s a Hittite ritual, but all the incantations are in Akkadian. And my work involved trying to figure out where they got these incantations from. You see, we have all these other Akkadian texts from the Hittites, but they are diplomatic texts and treaties. The Hittites had these written in their own scribolect, how they wrote Akkadian. The incantations from the babilili-ritual are not in that Akkadian dialect, however, and there aren’t that many ritual texts known from the Old Babylonian period. So, finding parallels to complete this edition was a time-consuming activity.
4) Your neighbor wants to know more about your field. What books, websites, videos, or other resources would you recommend to them? (why?)
Beckman: The most up-to-date and comprehensive surveys in English are by Trevor Bryce: The Kingdom of the Hittites (Oxford Univ. Press), Life and Society in the Hittite World (Oxford Univ. Press), and Warriors of Anatolia: A Concise History of the Hittites (London: I.B. Tauris).
I also recommend the film The Hittites: A Civilization That Changed the World, directed by Tolga Örnek and narrated by Jeremy Irons. Tolga Örnek is a well-known Turkish director, maybe not so much here in the U.S., but I know he’s made movies about spy capers and other things in Turkish, including a film about one of the most popular soccer clubs in Turkey.
This film The Hittites is both a costume drama and a documentary with talking heads. In terms of scholars, I’m in it, as are Theo van den Hout and my teacher Harry Hoffner, who passed away a couple of years ago. And the woman who plays Puduhepa is apparently a soap opera star in Turkey. My great claim to fame, and I think I’m even on IMDb (the Internet Movie Database), is that I wrote the Hittite dialogue. That is more or less phrases like “I’m gonna get you!” And the costumes are outrageous, all the Egyptians have Uraeus serpents on their helmets… They didn’t consult with me on costumes.
5) How does your research connect to broader public issues? What overlap do you see between the topics you study and contemporary issues around the world today?
Beckman: My work doesn’t really connect closely to contemporary public issues, seeing as how Hittite culture has been extinct for over 3,000 years. But the study of any civilization in detail allows us to see that humans have lived in different ways over the centuries and that our own culture, although likely preferable to us because of our familiarity, is not necessarily the only way to live. The Hittites also faced a climate crisis and a civil war that contributed to the collapse of their state. Their records also provide us with the fullest documentation of an early international system of diplomacy.
6) What other scholars/writers do you think are doing the most interesting work on religion in the Middle East?
Beckman: Beate Pongratz-Leisten (NYU) and Eckart Frahm (Yale) are very good, among the best. There are others who could be mentioned too, but most of them write in German. Many of the people who are doing cutting-edge work, considering some little problem about a text, are German and write in German.
But these two, Pongratz-Leisten and Frahm, have recently written books in English that cover a lot of territory and in a good way. Frahm’s book Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire (from Basic Books) tells you a great deal about Assyria in the first Millennium in particular, but he starts at the beginning. And then Pongratz-Leisten writes about kingship and religion in Assyria, and one of my great interests is the ideology of kingship among the Hittites and Mesopotamians.
In fact, now as I’m coming up to retirement, I’m planning to work on a comparison of the life in the Royal Court from the Hittites up through the Byzantines. For the Byzantines, we have a contemporary book all about how to behave at court, but we don’t have that for the cuneiform civilizations. So, I’ll have to gather all the incidental references in other kinds of records to see what people did.
Another great resource is the website The Corpus of Hittite Festivals, out of the Universities of Mainz and Würzburg. Mainz is where Heinrich Otten went after he retired, and he was given a position there at the Academy (Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur). He brought with him the archives of the Boğazkale archaeologists and philologists, which he carried somehow when he defected from East Germany. This included files of all the texts both published and unpublished, and lots of photographs. And now, in the age of computers and digital photos, almost all the texts and fragments are available online. You can log in, look up anything, and look at it. For almost everything, there is a good photo, and so you don’t have to go to Ankara or Berlin anymore to look at these.
Why is it called The Corpus of Hittite Festivals? Most, well certainly far more than half of the Hittite texts are religious ceremonies. We don’t have much administrative stuff and so forth. It seems that administrative records were kept on wooden tablets and those have all disappeared. The archives are only royal archives, we don’t have tablets from ordinary people. We think that whatever records they might have had — which we find in great numbers in Babylonia at the same time — have just disappeared. But they must have had them. An elaborate society must have had written records for ordinary people or at least more prosperous ones. But we just don’t have those, so we’re talking about the ruling class, which largely consisted of the extended family of the kings.
7) How can people find out more about you and follow your work?
Beckman: Most of my publications are available at the University of Michigan online repository, which is accessible to the public. My work is found here.
Thanks so much to Dr. Gary Beckman for speaking with me and sharing these details about his studies of Hittite religion and culture, as well as his edition of the Epic of Gilgamesh. I really encourage you to check out his work and consult the other great resources he mentioned here. For a complete list of the books, websites, and articles listed in this interview, you can also visit Interviewing Religion’s Books and Resources page.
And look for more interviews like this to come soon! You can subscribe to my blog here to get new posts directly by email.
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