© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2006 JANER 6 Also available online – www.brill.nl 1 I presented an early version of this article in 1996 at the Annual Meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research and I must thank Gary M. Beckman, H. Craig Melchert and Harry A. Hoffner, Jr. for offering very helpful comments at that time. I owe special thanks to Sarah Morris for taking an active interest in my work on pigs and encouraging me to look ever deeper into the Greek world of pig sacrifice. Finally, I extend my thanks to Ian Rutherford for organizing the Langford Symposium in 2005 and for including me among the list of speakers. PIGS AT THE GATE: HITTITE PIG SACRIFICE IN ITS EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN CONTEXT BILLIE JEAN COLLINS Abstract The consumption of pork in Hittite Anatolia is unlikely to have been a simple matter of geography or ethnicity, but was governed by a complex set of principles involving determiners like status, gender, and the level of cultic influence from religious sanctuaries. On the few occasions that the Hittite texts refer directly to eating pork, the context is highly ritualized, suggesting that special religious significance was sometimes attached to the eating of pig’s flesh. Further, drawing on evidence from the societies surrounding the Mediterranean basin, a case can be made for the private nature of pig sacrifice in Hittite Anatolia. They were killed to ensure the wellbeing of the community and the fertility of humans and crops. A festival performed in Istanuwa to reaffirm the human-divine relationship may parallel the practice of sacrificing a pig at the ratification of treaties in the classical world. Finally, this animal’s unique place among the domesticates extends to its role as a substitute for humans, a ritual motif that can be found through- out the Mediterranean in antiquity. It is fitting that Anatolia, the site of the earliest domestication of pigs (Redding and Rosenberg 1998:74), should also provide such a wide range of textual evidence for this animal’s cultic uses. 1 Pig sacrifice in Hittite Anatolia presents a unique challenge, as the pig was arguably the most versatile implement in the professional rit- ualist’s toolkit. The inhabitants of Anatolia in the Hittite period harbored an ambivalent attitude toward the animal that expressed itself in many aberrant rites: These are, however, representative of