Hiding Words Behind the Signs. The Use of Logograms in the Hittite Scribal Praxis

A feature of the Hittite cuneiform writing system (and of the other Near Eastern writing systems) is a broad employ of logograms in the written texts. Because of this wide use of logograms several Hittite words belonging to every semantic field are not known or rarely appear in texts. Hittite scribes did not limit their action to a passive adoption of an already established system but they often created new logograms or attributed new meanings to them. The interest for logographic forms as a product of scribal school raises the issue whether these were effectively pronounced and dictated during the process of texts’ preparation, or simply written down but always changed in the corresponding Hittite form in the spoken language