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Puduhepa of Hattusa: The Woman at the Centre of Homer

Authors: Samuel T Burdge;

Puduhepa of Hattusa: The Woman at the Centre of Homer

Abstract

Puduhepa, queen of Hatti and wife of Hattusili III (fl. c. 1267-1237 BCE), is the best-documented woman in the entire Bronze Age Near East. This paper argues that she is the most plausible single historical figure to have supplied, through demonstrable channels of Anatolian oral and cultic transmission, the structural templates for three distinct Homeric roles: Poseidon, Aphrodite, and Penelope. The argument proceeds by influence hypothesis throughout, never by identity assertion, and is organized around a multi-stage transmission model that traces a specific itinerary of memory from the Hittite scribal world through the intermediary cultures of Ugarit and Cyprus, through the Neo-Hittite successor kingdoms, and into the Euboean trading networks that carried Levantine literary and religious material into the Aegean in the ninth and eighth centuries BCE. This third edition substantially revises and expands the transmission argument in response to four categories of scholarly challenge: (1) the demand for a concrete itinerary of memory across the four-century Dark Age gap; (2) the functional gender-shift objection, which questions whether a foreign queen's historical acts can be the origin of a male deity's narrative role; (3) the over-determination objection, which treats the rhetorical parallels between Puduhepa's letters and Penelope's dialogue as universal tropes of female intelligence under pressure rather than genealogical descendants; and (4) the disciplinary silo objection, which questions whether a six-part argument spanning three ancient disciplines can be durable against revision in any single field. A new section (Section 3) addresses these four challenges systematically before the substantive argument proceeds.

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selected citations
These citations are derived from selected sources.
This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Citations provided by BIP!
popularity
This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Popularity provided by BIP!
influence
This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Influence provided by BIP!
impulse
This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Impulse provided by BIP!
0
Average
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