Author: E. V. Korovina (The Institute of Oriental and Classical Studies, Russian State University for the Humanities)

Summary\n: The text of Song of Ullikummi is traditionally analyzed as poetic, accentual verse, with four stressed words in a line. This analysis is based on the assumption that every line contains three types of words: always accented, always unaccented (clitics) and ambivalent words that might be both, see Melchert 1998, 2007; Kloekhorst 2011, 2014. But if one looks closely into the works on Hittite poetic meter, one can see that none of them are based on a thorough count. This work’s purpose is to fill the gap. The text contains 470 lines; but only completely preserved ones have been taken into consideration, 337 lines all in all. The number of words and syllables has been determined for each line, proclitic nu excluded (including occurrences with Wackernagel clitics). As has been shown, none of the attested lengths of lines significantly prevails on others. In Song 1 the proportion of four word lines is only 32%, and in the Song 3 it gets only 12% of all lines, and 30% are five word lines. The majority of the lines in the first and second tablets consists of 3 to 6 words, in the third tablet – 4 to 7 words. Thus, this research demonstrates that this poetic system cannot be treated as accentual one with four accents per line. Hittite verse in Song of Ullikummi cannot also be a syllabic verse. The most interesting conclusion is that “metric structure” of Song 3 is different from “metric structure” of Song 1 and Song 2.

References\n

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