188 herbert niehr
royal funerary cult. it can be seen at most as a royal offering rite. as the
inscription puts it:
(21) and the king shall lay [his hand] upon a fitting ram, and he shall send
forth this ram to the tomb of my father panamu[wa]. (Kai 215: 21)this ritual is not quite clear. there have been attempts to explain it as
a substitution rite following the hittite royal ancestor cult in which the
transgressions of the deceased are transferred to an animal.295 the ques-
tion remains, though, why the ram is sent with the king’s materia peccans
to the grave of his deceased predecessor. the text shows a rather close
connection between the person administering the sacrifice and the offer-
ing and the subsequent transfer of the offering to the deceased. perhaps
it deals with a cleansing rite of Bar-rakkab that is a one-time act and not
a repeating ritual prior to his ascension.
From the reign of King panamuwa ii comes the stele of the vassal296
Kuttamuwa, which was found in situ in the northern part of samʾal
(area 5). this find is more important than other stelae with banquet
scenes as they have almost never been found in their original archaeo-
logical context.297
Key to understanding the cultic installation and its function is the fact
that the corpse of Kuttamuwa had been interred elsewhere and that the
stele and its inscription are about the one-time inauguration festival of
the mortuary cult chamber298 and the yearly celebration for the care of
the deceased’s spirit (nbš).299
the inscription on the stele300 reads:
(1) i am Kuttamuwa, vassal of panamuwa, who commissioned for myself a
stele while
(2) still living and i placed it in my mortuary cult chamber301 and estab-
lished a feast (at)
295 so haas 2003: 43f, 783f.
296 on Kuttamuwa’s status as vassal or local dynast, cf. struble – herrmann 2009: 41
and esp. Masson 2010: 51 with note 30, who refers to the luwian title tarwani as an equiva-
lent to aramaic ʿbd. on this title, cf. Jasink 1998; giusfredi 2009; id. 2010: 90–97.
297 For the stele, cf. esp. struble – herrmann 2009 and herrmann forthcoming.
298 cf. also Masson 2010: 52 and lemaire 2012: 134.
299 also nebe 2010: 324 and lemaire 2012: 135.
300 For the editio princeps, cf. pardee 2009a and also id. 2009b.
301 according to Mazzini 2009 swd means “hall”, “audience-chamber”, “reception-hall”.
cf. also nebe 2010: 320f and del olmo lete 2011; lemaire 2012: 133f translates “chapelle
d’éternité” and mentions in this context the hittite term ḫešta, whereas Masson 2010: 52
proposes a comparison with hittite na 4 hekur in the sense of “... chapelles mortuaires des-