Journal of the American Oriental Society 130.1 (2010) 63 Hittite mē ˘ naḫḫanda

Journal of the American Oriental Society 130.1 (2010) 63 Hittite mē ˘ naḫḫanda Alexander Nikolaev Harvard University The Hittite preverb or postposition mē ˘ naḫḫanda ‘opposite, against, vis-à-vis, facing, toward’, sometimes spelled Sumerographically as IGI-an-da, is well attested from OS on. Examples are now readily available in CHD (L-N: 274–88) and HED (6: 145–46); 1 here is a selection: nu⸗šši LÚ.KÚR zaḫḫiya menaḫḫanda namma ŪL kuiški mazzašta “No enemy dared any longer (to go) against him in battle.” (KBo 5.6 i 7–8) menaḫḫanda[(⸗ya⸗ša)n k(urakki)] tapuwaš ZAG-ni GÙB-li nu kuwapiya QATAMMA 4 wallu[š dāi] “Opposite the pillar, alongside, on the right, on the left —everywhere in the same way [he deposits] four walluš.” (KBo 4.1 rev. 3–4) nu⸗šmaš⸗za ziqqa āššuš ēš tuqq⸗at IGI-an-da āššaweš ašandu “You be good to them, and let them be good toward you.” (KBo 12.30 ii 10–11) 1 LÚDAM.GÀR-ma⸗kan LUGAL-i menaḫḫanda arta “One merchant stands before/facing the king.” (KUB 57.95 iv 5–6) maḫḫan⸗ma⸗mu⸗kan LÚ.MEŠ URUDuqqamma menaḫḫanda awēr “When the men of D. saw me coming” (KBo 4.4 iv 18–19) kuedani⸗wa⸗za menaḫḫanda išḫamiškeši “To whom are you singing?” (KUB 36.12 ii 9) nu⸗mu MUNUS-TUM kuit menaḫḫanda uet n⸗aš⸗mu GÌR.MEŠ-aš kattan ḫaliyattat “Because the woman came to meet me, and prostrated herself at my feet” (KUB 14.15 iv 28–29) The word mē ˘ naḫḫanda has traditionally been compared with mē ˘ na/i- n. (pl. tant.), mē ˘ na- c. ‘face, cheek’, and this comparison is hard to deny. 2 The second part of mē ˘ naḫḫanda is, however, problematic. The word has been parsed into mēna and ḫant‑. The latter is a frequent Hittite word meaning ‘forehead, front’ and the usual assumption has been that mē ˘ naḫḫanda is a compound of two nouns in allative case, ‘face’ and ‘forehead’. 3 1. Author’s note: I would like to thank Gary Beckman, Jay Jasanoff, H. Craig Melchert, Sergio Neri, Martin Peters, Bridget Samuels, and Andrew Shatskov for many helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper. See also Rieken 1999: 56 for a partial revision of the CHD entry. 2. See HED 6: 147; Tischler 1990: 194–95; and Poetto 1986: 126 n. 8 for references. 3. Friedrich 1952: 141; Melchert 1994: 237; HED 6: 147; Kloekhorst 2008: 576. 64 Journal of the American Oriental Society 130.1 (2010) Such segmentation appears questionable on several counts; first of all, this analysis fails to provide a principled explanation of the meaning: it is a priori not clear how a compound ‘face–forehead’ came to mean ‘facing’. Since ḫant- (c. and n.) never means ‘face’, but only ‘forehead’ or ‘front’, 4 English “face-to-face” and French “vis-à-vis” are not real parallels. The nature of the relationship between the two members of this alleged compound is unclear, too. Hittite has a few endocentric determinative compounds, tatpuruṣas and karmadhārayas (e.g., pappanekneš ‘brothers having the same father’ from pappa ‘father’ + negna- ‘brother’; tuzziyašeššar ‘settlement of an army’ from tuzzi ‘army’ + ašeššar ‘settle- ment’ 5), but even under the assumption that ḫant- (as nomen regens) is used in its lexical meaning ‘forehead, front’, the meaning ‘into the forehead/front of the face’ simply does not make a lot of sense. Neither does mē ˘ naḫḫanda easily lend itself to an analysis in terms of a copulative compound ‘into the face and into the front’. Although Hittite has a few com- pounds of this type (e.g., ḫaššaḫanzašša- ‘grand- and great-grandsons’), 6 one has a hard time perceiving virtual (*)mē ˘ naḫḫand- as a partes-pro-toto synecdoche (so HED 6: 147), since the original meaning of mena/i- is already ‘face’! In fact, Hittite itself provides an example of how a name for a body part can be construed through a synecdochical combination of two parts, namely, a copulative compound šakuišša- that likely means ‘face’ and is formed from šaku- ‘eye’ and ašš-/išš- ‘mouth’. 7 A different solution involving ḫant‑ has been proposed: it has been maintained that ḫant- or, rather ḫanda, is used here not in the meaning ‘front’, but rather in its adverbialized locative meaning ‘in front of’ (so prominent among other descendants of Indo-European *h2ent-). 8 However, this theory does not solve the problem at hand either. While Hittite ḫanti ‘opposite, against’ has a good chance of being an inherited adverb (cf. Greek ἀντί ‘in front of’, Latin ante ‘before’, Sanskrit ánti ‘id.’ 9), there is no reason or comparative evidence that would allow us to make the same assumption in the case of other adverbial offshoots of ḫant- ‘forehead’, namely, ḫandaš, ḫanza(n), ḫantaz, or ḫanda, all of which are best accounted for as later lexicalizations of inflected forms of the base noun ḫant-. The adverb ḫanda is attested from MH / MS on and the word normally means ‘for the sake of, in view of’ (a meaning of course incompatible with the meaning of mē ˘ naḫḫanda). 10 It would therefore be method- ologically unsound to assign to Hittite ḫanda a meaning ‘against’ or ‘in front of’ based on the root etymology alone and claim that this etymological meaning of ḫanda has only been preserved in mē ˘ naḫḫanda. An alternative analysis is thus desirable. My own proposal builds on the idea of Duchesne- Guillemin (1947: 75), who argued in passing that the second part of the word mē ˘ naḫḫanda is the well-known Hittite postposition anda ‘into’. It is worth noting that there is a piece of Anatolian evidence not known to Duchesne- Guillemin that seems to support his solution: if analyzed as mē ˘ naḫḫ⸗anda, the Hittite word 4. E.g., KBo 10.23 iv 5–6: ḫandi⸗šši⸗ma⸗šmaš⸗kan armanniš GUŠKIN “but on the forehead they have a golden crescent.” The metal ornament could only have been worn on the forehead. 5. See Hoffner–Melchert 2008: 63 and Matzinger 2008: 59–60. 6. These do not exactly correspond to dvandvas (in Sanskrit terminology), but rather seem to be recent univer- bations (as is shown by the fact that often the first member appears in an inflected form). See Rieken 2005. 7. Attested dat.-loc. šakuiššai; see Rieken 2005: 102. 8. This seems to be the contention of Carruba 1966: 33 (supported by Starke 1977: 192), whose evidence for a local adverb ḫanda ‘vor’ is, however, very doubtful and is essentially limited to māḫḫanda. 9. Eventually, of course, all these forms continue a locative of *h2ent-; the point to be emphasized is that in this case the adverbialization is of PIE date. 10. E.g., KBo 3.21 ii 12 šargawanni ḫanda “in view of exaltedness”; KBo 1.1 iv 61 ŠA ŠEŠ-YA nakkiyanni ḫanda “out of regard for my brother’s eminence”; KUB 31.4 16 kuit ḫanda “for the sake of what?” 65 Nikolaev: Hittite mē ˘ naḫḫanda is reminiscent of its near-synonym in Lycian, namely ñtewe ̃ ‘facing, opposite; toward’, in origin a compound of *en and tewe ̃ * ‘eye’. 11 Even more important is the complete match between the formal structure of Hittite mē ˘ naḫḫ⸗anda and Lycian xtewe ñte TL 44a,53 ‘fac- ing’ < *‘into the eye’, 12 where ñte shows a Lycian correspondence of Hittite anda used as postposition to a designation of a part of the face. Nevertheless, at the time when Duchesne-Guillemin proposed his solution, his case was very weak, since he had to leave open the question of the morphology of the first part, mē ˘ naḫḫ-; for this reason his suggestion has been largely neglected in later scholarship. It therefore behooves us to say a few words about the origin and morphological history of the stem mē ˘ na/i- ‘face, cheek’ first. The following forms of this word are attested: nom.-acc.sg. neut. mē ˘ ni (3x; e.g., me-e-ni- i⸗m-mi-it KBo 3.22 rev. 52 [OS]) and mēna, loc. sg. mēni, and acc. pl. comm. menuš. 13 This allomorphy is best explained with E. Rieken (1994: 51; 1999: 56–58), who traced the stem- final -i- to an old athematic dual ending *-ih1 (of the type we find in Homeric ὄσσε from the root noun *h3ekw- ‘eye’); indeed, a dual form must have been quite frequent with a word one of whose meanings is ‘cheek’. The pre-Hittite paradigm of this word would therefore include an animate root noun *men‑ 14 and a dual *menī ˘ the thematic stem mena- (acc.pl.c. me-nu-uš) is easily explainable as an innovation whose starting point would be the reinterpretation of acc. sg. *menan as a thematic form. There is an important consequence of this morphological analysis for our purposes. If the thematic stem mena- is an inner-Hittite innovation, the adverb mē ˘ naḫḫanda (OS+) would be unlikely to contain this stem as its first member. 15 This means that if mē ˘ naḫḫanda is to be segmented as mē ˘ naḫḫ⸗anda, its first part has to be an allomorph made from an athematic stem *men‑. The problem of mē ˘ naḫ can now be revisited: in my opinion, mē ˘ naḫ is an archaic allative form meaning ‘to the face’. The resulting meaning of univerbated mē ˘ naḫḫ⸗anda is then ‘into the face’, which is effectively what the word means. 16 However, as is uploads/Ingenierie_Lourd/ nikolaev-hittite-menahhanda.pdf

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