Comparative Notes on Hurro-Urartian, Northern Caucasian

Ishtar—Hurrian Firingar. This Hurrian epithet refers to the quality of the goddess
which was preserved and developed in the archaic Greek tradition for which “the
connection between the ‘polis’ and the female divinity” 305 was particularly important.
The link between the City-pÒliw and a female goddess and her priestess is particularly
clear in the cult of Pamphylian Artemis:
À Pergé, en Pamphylie, dans le sanctuaire d’Artémis Pergaía, divinité
‘poliade’, la prêtrise ne pouvait être exercée que par une femme,
citoyenne (astê), résidant dans la ville (ástu), née de parents habitant la cité
depuis trois générations en ligne paternelle et maternelle. Prêtresse à vie,
elle se charge de tous les sacrifices publiques et privés; et à chaque
nouvelle lune, elle doit sacrifier pour le ‘salut de la cité’… Sacrifice politique
dont la référence à la cité est triple: fonction ‘poliade’ d’Artémis;
appartenance de la prêtresse à la ville-cité sur la profondeur de trois
générations; commensalité réservée aux épouses légitimes, vicaires des
citoyens les plus intimement associés aux décisions de la cité. 306
It is the relation alone of the goddess to the City-Polis (“fonction ‘poliade’”—“urbanistic
function”) that is expressed in the Hurrian epithet. Although the adjective referring to
this aspect of the goddess might seem to contradict the wild element inherent in her
cult, it has been shown in recent studies that in Artemis not so much nature by itself but
its carnival relation to society was stressed. 307
If the name of Artemis was borrowed into Greek from Hurrian through probable
Lydian mediation, it may hint at the direction in which cultural influences might have
worked in ancient Asia Minor. As the Anatolian goddess was connected to horses, the
origin of her name may shed light on the way in which the Greek name for horse was
changed. It might have been borrowed from one of the Northern Anatolian Indo-
European languages. The weakness of this hypothesis on the borrowing into Greek
from Northern Anatolian, despite all its merits, is the absence of any textual evidence
for the respective Anatolian forms (incidentally preventing one from deciding on the
source of the initial h- in the Greek word, which in Anatolian might have had a
plots of arable land” (Plural); Western Caucasian *d w P “plain, field” > Abkhaz a-dwP, Diakonoff and
Starostin 1986, 26; 1988, 175; Nikolayev and Starostin 1994, 557.
305 Freidenberg 1997, 277. See a special article on this subject by Vernant with an analysis of Artemis’
social role: Vernant 1988, 37-38. Cf. on Trezene: Calame 1996, 228.
306 Detienne and Vernant 1979, 195-196.