Anatolian Interfaces: Hittites, Greeks and their Neighbours. Proceedings of an International Conference on Cross-Cultural Interaction, September 17-19, 2004, Emory University, Atlanta, GA (review)

It is now more than a decade since Calvert Watkins observed that classicists did not "seem to be trampling each other in their haste to get at the Hittite texts," and were thus, he implied, denying themselves the opportunity to explore the "linguistic and thematic connections between speakers from these geographically contiguous regions [of Greece and Anatolia], who were certainly in contact at various times and in various places in the second millennium B.C. and later."¹ This book might start the stampede. It offers a wealth of material for Hellenists, insight and information on a wide range of topics: the evolution of epic, Homeric formulas, Mycenaean Hittite diplomatic correspondence, Lesbos as a Hittite possession, the purple-dye industry in the Late Bronze Age, girls' choruses, the Hellenistic devotees of Kybele, the homeland of the wandering Luwians, isoglosses between Greek and Anatolian languages, Lydian loanwords in Greek, and much more.

A brief introduction by the editors succinctly provides the geographical, historical, and cultural context for the studies to come in the volume and identifies general issues to be addressed.²

Eric Cline then leads off with the Anatolian topos (literal and figurative) of concern to all classicists: Troy. He sees Troy as a multicultural "contested periphery," claimed and fought for in the Late Bronze Age by Mycenaeans to the west and Hittites to the east, and in the modern world "positioned on the periphery between academic and popular scholarship (11–12)." The "contest" between Troy's recent excavator, the late Manfred Korfmann and his Tübingen colleague and media-focused detractor Frank Kolb is briefly visited, and the relegation of Troy and the Trojan War to "the fringe of serious academia," thanks to the general public's association of Troy with topics such as Atlantis and Noah's Ark, lamented. Cline closes with the hope that future cross-disciplinary comparisons with other, similarly contested peripheral areas will help us to better understand Late Bronze Age Troy and the Troad. One might also note with satisfaction that the recent and (one hopes) increasing "cross-cultural" interaction in scholarship between classicists and Anatolianists—attested to by the volume under review here, and the conference which gave rise to it—offers ever more promising results in revealing the history and culture of this peripheral but pivotal region.

In a letter sent in the late 14th or early 13^th century BC to the Hittite king by Manapa-Tarhunta, king of the Seha River Land in western Anatolia, we learn that there has been a raid on the Land of Lazpa (Greek Lesbos) and that among those taken prisoner is a group of ŞĀRIPŪTU-men who are in the service of the Hittite king. Their appeal to their captors is recorded: "We are tributaries (arkammanaliuš) and we came o[ve]r the sea. Let us [render] our tribute (arkamman)! Šigauna may have committed a crime, but we have done nothing." Eventually, following an intervention by (apparently) the king of Mira, "the ŞĀRIPŪTU-men of the gods who (belong) to His Majesty" were released. Itamar Singer accepts a recent interpretation (made in another context) of ŞĀRIPŪTU-men as "purple-dyers" and takes us through a detailed and completely fascinating account of the purple-dye industry and its terminology in the ancient Near East, Anatolia, and the Aegean, ending back in Lazpa, where the "tribute" to be rendered by the Hittite king's ŞĀRIPŪTU-men is now seen to be purple wool, an expensive and prestigious "tribute" almost certainly intended as a dedication to "some important deity of Lazpa … perhaps an early hypostasis of Aphrodite...