The Treaty with Ulmi-Tešub

Abstract

The treaty of a Hittite king, whose name is lost, with Ulmi-Tešub, king of Tarhuntassa (KBo. IV 10 + KUB XL 69 + 1548/u, CTH 106) is a complex and problematic document. Published as a hand-copy by Forrer in 1920, no modern edition of the text has yet appeared in print. It contains an unusually full description of the boundaries of Ulmi-Tešub's vassal kingdom, and in order to provide a sound basis for the reconstruction of Hittite political geography I contributed a translation of the boundary description and of most of the other clauses to John Garstang's book The Geography of the Hittite Empire in 1959. J. Lorenz, a student of Marburg University, prepared an edition in 1986 as a dissertation, but this has remained unpublished. The same is true of a similar edition prepared in 1989 for the University of Amsterdam by T. van den Hout, though this is understood to have gone to press. Dr. van den Hout, however, has published his views on this treaty in some detail in an article “A Chronology of the Tarhuntassa Treaties” in JCS 41 (1989), 100–14, where he introduces the text in his first sentence as “KBo 4 10 (CTH 106), the treaty between Tudhaliya IV and Ulmi-Tešub, king of Tarhuntassa”.