1 Orion in Hittite? Billie Jean Collins The Hittite-language ritual attributed to the woman Āllī (CTH 402) derives from the westernmost reaches of the Anatolian peninsula, in the territory of Arzawa as it was known to the Hittites, the capital of which was at Apasa/Ephesos. Miletos, to the south in Caria, on the other hand, was, from early on, a center of Minoan and Mycenaean culture. This region in the Late Bronze Age has been called variously an interface, middle ground, border zone, or frontier, where pre-Greeks/Mycenaeans and native Anatolians interacted and significantly impacted one another. 1 Āllī’s ritual was transmitted to the Hittite capital of Hattusa sometime in the fifteenth century BCE, probably during the reign of Tudhaliya I, who had campaigned in the region and thus had opportunity, but also who had made it his business to amass a body of ritual knowledge for the use of the royal house. 2 The composition, in the form in which it has been passed down to us, is an amalgam of elements, some organic and some inserted later and then embellished by the Hattusa scribes. The earliest copies of the ritual date to the fifteenth–early fourteenth centuries and the latest to the late-thirteenth century, with the remainder belonging to the late fourteenth–early thirteenth centuries. 3 Its numerous copies (at least 11 are known) and its length (some 44 paragraphs survive) indicate that it became a popular school text for the training of scribes. Numerous variants across the exemplars 4 confirm a complicated text tradition. Despite its origins in Arzawa, a territory that has long been assumed to be populated by Luwian (or Luwic) speakers, the ritual lacks Luwian words or passages that would seal its place in the Luwian religious tradition. One reason that has been suggested to explain this lack is the means of transmission: the ritual was first textualized in Hittite, the language of the scribes who had been directed to record it. 5 A contributing factor not so far considered, however, is that the ritual could have been communicated not by native Anatolians but rather by pre-Greeks. 1 E.g., Taracha 2009, 24; 2018, 8–12. 2 E.g., Collins 2019, 195–96; forthcoming b. 3 Mouton 2012, 247–49. 4 Mouton 2012, 259–62; Marcuson and van den Hout 2015, 146–51. 5 Archi 2015b, 291; see also Collins 2019, 194–95.