Hittite military ritual texts

The Hittite society, ruled by the Great King who had the titles of both high priest and commander-in-chief, attributed the evils, impurities, bad luck, and even diseases to the anger of the gods. In order to reverse this anger, they offered various caterings and sacri-fices to the gods they invited. In accordance with the Hittite belief, the gods ate and drank these caterings and then looked after the Hittite country with kindness. Religious officials such as priests and seers transferred this mutual divine relationship, which they transformed into ritual acts, to clay tablets by means of scribes, and when necessary, they performed rituals under the guidance of these sacred texts. They kept these sacred documents in the royal archives based in Hattuša, the Hittite capital known as Boğazkale, in order to be used by future generations. Among these ritual practices that have survived to the present day thanks to meticu-lous protection, military issues that the army resorted to in order to cope with the negative situations it faced while fulfilling its duty to protect the Hittite state against the kingdoms exhibiting hostile attitudes in and out of Anatolia also have an important place. The aim of our study, which we put forward within the scope of these military subjects, is to search the military issues among the Hittite religious rituals, to analyze the determined military-themed rituals one by one and to reveal the information obtained. The Hittite military ritu-als that we could reach for this purpose were evaluated under four main headings as mili-tary rituals performed for the purpose of purification and curse of the enemy as well as dis-cipline and physical training, military rituals performed before the war, military rituals per-formed after the war and military rituals against epidemics. First of all, transcription and translation of every military ritual that we have exam-ined under these topics are given. Then, the bibliographic information of the ritual text, its temporal and spatial content, its participants and most importantly its purpose were re-vealed so that each ritual could be analyzed comprehensively. Next, the objects and magi-cal processes used in the ritual were determined. The magic methods that are necessarily found in the structure of every religious ritual and finally the prominent terms in the ritual are discussed. Keywords: 1. Hittite Army 2. Magic 3. Ritual