Anatolian Hieroglyphic Writing and Meta-Writing

The Name of Kubaba

Abstract

This contribution discusses the writing of the name of the goddess Kubaba. In its fullest form, her name is marked with the classifier for “god” next to full phonetic writing of Kubaba as ku-pa-pa-. Curiously, most spell- ings include a bird sign (AVIS) after the first syllable, ku. This paper addresses the spelling, which seems to break with the current understanding of how Anatolian hieroglyphic writing functioned. It is argued that this particular writing exceeds the recording of linguistic content with the bird sign, which is to be understood as meta-writing, i.e., a visual comment on the writing.