ANAMED LIBRARY COMMUNITY LECTURES

Koç Üniversitesi Anadolu Medeniyetleri Araştırma Merkezi (Koç University's Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations - ANAMED)

Tarih : 08-05-2024 18:00 - 08-05-2024 19:00

Cycles of the Hittite Calendar

Vladimir Shelestin, PhD, Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Date & Time: 8 May, 6.00-7.00 p.m

Location: ANAMED Library

Vladimir Shelestin participated during the 2019-2023 years in the project "Calendars and Festivals of the Ancient Near East" at St. Petersburg State University. During his business trips to Istanbul, he used the resources of the ANAMED Library to understand the basic principles of the Hittite calendar and temporal perception. He published the essential results of the project in the book chapter "Hittite Calendar in Its Rhythm" and several journal papers in English and Russian. Among the most important outcomes of this project is establishing the multi-year cycles of the Hittite calendar, where we can observe the basic (agricultural, fiscal, and sacral) cycle of three years, while the six- and nine-year cycles of Central Anatolia derive from it. Some cycles came to the Hittites from other cultures, like the seven-year cycle of Syrian origin. The Hittite attitude towards the local calendars of their provinces shows their open-mindedness and tolerance, typical for their religion. Such perception of the calendar explains why Hittites were among a few civilizations that did not use the proper month names.

 

Vladimir Shelestin

He was born in 1988, graduated in 2009 from the Faculty of History of the Lomonosov Moscow State University and received his PhD in world history in 2014 at the Institute of General World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow, Russia). He worked in 2015–2016 at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut, and at the ANAMED, Koç University (Istanbul). He was visiting researcher in 2017 at the British Institute at Ankara and at the Institut Français d'Études Anatoliennes (Istanbul). He works on the problems of Hittite history, paleography, historical geography and chronology in the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 2016. He gave the talks at 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th International Congresses of Hittitology (Warsaw, 2011; Çorum, 2014; Chicago, 2017; Çorum, 2021; Istanbul, 2023) and at 55th, 57th, 59th and 65th Rencontres Internationales Assyriologiques (Paris, 2009; Rome, 2011; Ghent, 2013; Paris, 2019).