ANAMED LIBRARY COMMUNITY LECTURES
Koç Üniversitesi Anadolu Medeniyetleri Araştırma Merkezi (Koç University's Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations - ANAMED)
Tarih : 08-05-2024 18:00 - 08-05-2024 19:00
Cycles of the Hittite Calendar
Vladimir Shelestin, PhD, Institute of Oriental
Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Date & Time: 8 May, 6.00-7.00 p.m
Location: ANAMED Library
Vladimir Shelestin participated during the
2019-2023 years in the project "Calendars and Festivals of the Ancient
Near East" at St. Petersburg State University. During his business trips
to Istanbul, he used the resources of the ANAMED Library to understand the
basic principles of the Hittite calendar and temporal perception. He published
the essential results of the project in the book chapter "Hittite Calendar
in Its Rhythm" and several journal papers in English and Russian. Among
the most important outcomes of this project is establishing the multi-year
cycles of the Hittite calendar, where we can observe the basic (agricultural,
fiscal, and sacral) cycle of three years, while the six- and nine-year cycles
of Central Anatolia derive from it. Some cycles came to the Hittites from other
cultures, like the seven-year cycle of Syrian origin. The Hittite attitude
towards the local calendars of their provinces shows their open-mindedness and
tolerance, typical for their religion. Such perception of the calendar explains
why Hittites were among a few civilizations that did not use the proper month
names.
Vladimir Shelestin
He was born in 1988, graduated in 2009 from the
Faculty of History of the Lomonosov Moscow State University and received his
PhD in world history in 2014 at the Institute of General World History of the
Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow, Russia). He worked in 2015–2016 at the
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut, and at the ANAMED,
Koç University (Istanbul). He was visiting researcher in 2017 at the British
Institute at Ankara and at the Institut Français d'Études Anatoliennes
(Istanbul). He works on the problems of Hittite history, paleography,
historical geography and chronology in the Institute of Oriental Studies of the
Russian Academy of Sciences since 2016. He gave the talks at 8th, 9th, 10th,
11th and 12th International Congresses of Hittitology (Warsaw, 2011; Çorum,
2014; Chicago, 2017; Çorum, 2021; Istanbul, 2023) and at 55th, 57th, 59th and 65th
Rencontres Internationales Assyriologiques (Paris, 2009; Rome, 2011; Ghent,
2013; Paris, 2019).