Dr. Durusu-Tanrıöver's talk, "One King to Rule Them All: Royal Singularity and Divine Plurality in Hittite Art" will be given as an online lecture organized by the ARWA Art History & Visual Studies Liaison Group.

Representations of divine figures in Hittite art were characterized by

multiplicity. Same or similar deities could be represented multiple

times in a scene —such as in Yazılıkaya—, and their multiple

incarnations (including anthropomorphic representations and statues of

their sacred animals) were evoked across the Hittite corpus. In

contrast, the figural representations of the Hittite kings were few in

number, conservative in style, and necessitated the presence of a

divine element to exist. Building on these initial propositions, in

this talk I propose that the Hittite kings deliberately mobilized a

polymorphic divine world to draw their legitimacy from, while carving

a calculated position for themselves in between the mortal and the

divine realms to make sure that legitimacy could not be contested.



Friday, Dec 2, 2022

16.00 CET (Rome, Paris, Berlin / UTC+1)

18.00 (İstanbul, Athens, Baghdad / UTC+3)

10.00 (New York / UTC-5)



Join us via Webex:

https://fu-berlin.webex.com/fu-berlin/j.php?MTID=med9332b5d6ba85901d42e8a0fd9b86cc



This lecture is part of a series entitled “And What about Art?

Investigating Visual Forms in the Cultural Practice of Ancient Western

Asia”, organized by Dominik Bonatz and Elisa Roßberger (both FU

Berlin).