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Archibald Henry Sayce was born in Shirehampton, Bristol, to a family of Shropshire descent.Sayce was a fragile child who suffered from tuberculosis. Although this meant he started his education late he soon caught up, aided by a private tutor. By age ten he was reading Homer in the original Greek.He attended The Queen's College, Oxford, and became a fellow in 1869.In 1874 Sayce published a long paper, 'The Astronomy and Astrology of the Babylonians'. It was one of the first publications to recognise and translate astronomical cuneiform texts. By 1876, he had deciphered one of the hieroglyphics inscribed on stones at Hamath in Syria, by deducing that the profile of a man stood for "I". By his very methodical methods and work he was able in 1882, in a lecture to the Society of Biblical Archaeology in London, to state that the Hittites, far from being a small Canaanite tribe who dealt with the kings of the northern Kingdom of Israel, were the people of a "lost Hittite empire." He and William Wright identified the ruins at Boghazkoy with Hattusa, the capital of a Hittite Empire that stretched from the Aegean Sea to the banks of the Euphrates, centuries before the age of the Old Testament patriarchs.It was a major advance in our understanding of this period of antiquity.

Hittites.

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The topic of the Anatolian panthea in the Bronze Age deals with Hattian, Hittite, Palaean, Luwian and Hurrian gods who have been worshiped in the Kingdom of Ḫatti. In such a context, along with trying to keep a balanced and methodologically-aware approach in our original research, we realized that a multi-authored work such as the present volume, with papers written by some of the major experts of Anatolian religious history, would represent an invaluable contribution to the advancement of a complex and vast field. This collection of essays is the result of the workshop Theonyms, Panthea and Syncretisms in Hittite Anatolia and Northern Syria, held at the University of Verona on 25th and 26th March 2022. Colleagues with different areas of expertise pertaining to the topic of Anatolian religions contributed to an extremely successful event.

Hittites. --- Hittites --- History.

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The nature of the administration of sacred time in Hittite Anatolia represents a complex problem, which has received little attention until recent years. This paper provides an overview of the topic, reconsidering the Hittite religious calendar as a whole and analysing some of the main issues connected with the Hittite calendrical system, such as the problem of the beginning of the year, the lunar nature of the Hittite month and the alleged existence of a system of intercalation.

Hittites --- Religion.

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The present dissertation is concerned with the KIN oracle, a symbolic divination technique produced by the Hittite in the 2nd mill. B.C. and developed only in the Hittite cultural milieu. Like other omens of the Ancient Near East, the Hittite oracles were considered to be messages from the gods. The Hittite solicited omens included Extispicy, Augury, the Bed Oracle, the ḪURRI-Bird Oracle, the Snake Oracle, and the KIN Oracle. Although many studies have already explained how the different divination systems worked, the KIN oracle frame still remains difficult to understand in all of its features. In this research the KIN cuneiform sources and its oracular structure have been analyzed in all respects and enriched with tables, patterns, and pictures in order to better understand the work carried out. As far as the KIN is concerned, this research provides several different analytic implications both for Hittite and divination studies.

Hittites --- Rites and ceremonies.

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The "Sun-goddess of the earth" and the less clearly defined category of "chthonic solar deities" of Hittite religion have been the objects of various studies in recent years. This paper aims to examine the significance of these categories of deities within the Hittite festival texts. Although the Sun-goddess of the earth achieves some prominence in local cult contexts, such as at Zippalanda and Nerik, she otherwise remains a marginal deity. This contrasts with her general significance in Hittite magical rituals. The chthonic solar deities represent a less tangible deity type that is associated with death and the netherworld, but that also does not attain overarching significance in the Hittite state pantheon. Finally, the paper addresses the question, to what cultural milieu can we trace the beginnings of the Sun-goddess of the earth? Efforts to identify her origins in the Hattian milieu of north-central Anatolia will be critiqued, favoring the Luwian milieu instead as the most likely from which the tradition of the Sun-goddess emerged, and later flourished in the magical traditions especially that became widespread in Hittite society of Late Bronze Age Anatolia.

Gods, Hittite. --- Hittites --- Religion.