zappiyalla/i-

The lexeme occurs in a Luwian wish for blessings within a festival text (NS). It is further attested in a Luwian ritual fragment, see Sasseville 2021b:176-178.

[E.R.]

dat./loc. sg.	za-ap-˹pí˺-ia-al-li	KUB 35.133 iii 16	(CTH 665, LNS)
	za-ap-pí-ia-〈al〉-li	Privat 40 iii 6	(CTH 770, N/A)

Checked against the photographs in the Konkordanz, except for Privat 40.

[E.R.]

Two syntactic interpretations of the short sentence a-ta ^URUḫa-at-tu-ša za-ap-˹pí˺-ia-al-li za-an-ta ša-at-te-eš ‘you shall let them (the blissful items mentioned before) down on Ḫattuša z.’ have been advanced. The first to consider a dat./loc. case form for zappiyalli was van Brock 1962a:149. Carruba 1982a:44, recognizing that the word specifies the more general location ^URUḪattuša, takes it as a noun in appositional function and opts for ‘storehouse’. More recently, Goedegebuure 2010a:309 adopts the syntactic analysis but prefers not to translate the word. The second interpretation of zappiyalli is as an adjective modifying ^URUḪattuša and presupposes that the negatively connotated semantics of ‘destruction’ seen in zappi(ya)- (see under Lemma) are inherited in the derivative zappiyalla/i-, thus tentatively ‘full of destruction (?)’ (Yakubovich, pers. comm.).

The latter solution remains problematic, because the city of Ḫattuša is not expected to be characterized negatively in festival texts (as opposed to incantations). In contrast, a positive content similar to Carruba’s suggestion would suit the context of the short prayer spoken to the Storm-god. In consideration of the semantics of the root zapp- ‘trickle, leak’, it is suggested here that zappiyalli means ‘soft rain shower’ and is to be understood as the means by which the Storm-god lets down his blessings on the city, i.e. ‘you shall let them down on Ḫattuša in a rain shower’ and thus not untypical for a Storm-god.

[E.R.]

According to the syntactic and semantic analysis presented above, zappiyalli is a noun in the dat./loc. sg. belonging to a denominative stem in -alla/i-. Its base would be the noun *zappiya- ‘trickling, leaking’, an abstract built on the Luwian equivalent of Hitt. zappiye/a- ‘to trickle, leak, flow’. Consequently, zappiyalla/i- means ‘(the one) related to trickling, leaking’, concretized as ‘soft rain shower’.

[E.R.]

For the lemma head see Luw. *zapp-.