The grammar of Hittite poetry

The Hittite ‘poetic’ style is rich in rhetorical artifices that give the lines a strong rhythmic pattern. These devices can be considered as the principle tokens of the grammar of Hittite poetry: they are the constitutive elements of poetic language. Among of them the repetition is the most common, as would be expected in a popular form of poetry born from oral tradition. This study will examine the figures of speech that occur most frequently in Hittite poetic texts as alliteration, assonance, homoioteleuton, isocolon, chiasmus, metaphor and point out the ability of scribes to coin a neologism for poetic purposes.