KING AND PRIEST SPEECH AND ACTS IN HITTITE: AN IE HERITAGE?

The focus of my paper is the Hittite sacral sphere concerning the speech and the actions of the king and the main priest. I’ll try to compare some lexemes from selected passages with the corresponding words or roots in other IE languages. The selected Hittite lexicon refers specifically to some acts and verbal contexts, when the king (and the queen) and the priest are celebrating in some places some gods, with some instruments and together with other people. The aim of this paper is to build a semantic field combining, on the one hand, the corresponding selected IE stems gathered through the following onomasiological lists and the Hittite contexts where they occur; on the other hand, the etymological roots and their comparison within the IE languages. Starting from an onomasiological perspective, we try to outline in a lexical framework the semantical field and the lexicon of the sacral sphere in Hittite.