Hittite & Anatolian

In a limestone cleft near the ruins of a lost capital in central Turkey, the gods walk in stone. Carved in low relief along the rock walls of the open-air sanctuary of Yazılıkaya, two processions of deities — the gods advancing from the left, the goddesses from the right — converge at the center, where the great Storm-god and the great Goddess meet face to face. It is a photograph, three thousand years old, of an entire pantheon: the assembled "thousand gods of Hatti," the deliberately vast and inclusive divine world of a Bronze Age empire that history forgot and archaeology recovered.

The empire that was rediscovered

The Hittites were an Indo-European people who built a great empire across Anatolia (roughly 1650–1180 BCE), centered on their capital Hattusa (modern Boğazköy). For most of recorded history they were all but unknown — a name in the Hebrew Bible and a few Egyptian records — until, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, archaeologists uncovered Hattusa and its royal archive of some thirty thousand cuneiform tablets, and scholars deciphered the Hittite language, which turned out to be the oldest attested Indo-European language in the world. Suddenly a whole vanished civilization, and one of the best-documented religions of the Bronze Age, came back into view.

The thousand gods

Hittite religion was extraordinarily absorptive. The Hittites themselves spoke of "the thousand gods of Hatti," and they meant it almost literally: when they conquered a city, they did not abolish its gods but carried the divine images back to Hattusa and added them to the state cult. The result was a pantheon layered from many peoples — the indigenous Hattians, the Hurrians of northern Syria (from whom the Hittites took much of their high theology), the Luwians, and the Mesopotamians. Two deities stood above the rest: the Storm-god, Tarhunna (identified with the Hurrian Teshub), lord of thunder and rain, depicted striding on a bull with the lightning in his hand; and the Sun-goddess of Arinna (identified with the Hurrian mother-goddess Hepat), "Queen of all lands," the protectress of the kingdom and the king. The Hittite king was her chief priest, and his first duty was to keep the festivals of the gods — neglect of the cult was believed to bring disaster on the land.

The kingship in heaven

The Hittites preserved, from their Hurrian neighbors, one of the most consequential myth-cycles of the ancient world: the Kumarbi Cycle, whose central poem is titled Kingship in Heaven. It tells of a succession of sky-rulers, each violently overthrowing the last: Alalu is toppled by Anu (the Sky); Anu is deposed by Kumarbi, who bites off and swallows Anu's genitals and is thereby impregnated with the storm-god; and from Kumarbi is born Teshub, who at last takes the throne of heaven. In the sequel, the Song of Ullikummi, Kumarbi begets a monstrous stone giant on a great rock to overthrow Teshub, and the storm-god must battle it.

The importance of this is hard to overstate, because the same story turns up in Greece. Hesiod's Theogony (ch08) tells of exactly this succession — Ouranos (Sky) castrated by Kronos, Kronos overthrown by Zeus the storm-god — complete with the castration of the sky-father and the swallowing motif, and Zeus's final battle with the monster Typhon mirrors Teshub's battle with Ullikummi. Scholars widely accept that the Greek succession myth descends, through Anatolian and Near Eastern intermediaries, from this older Hurrian-Hittite pattern. The birth of the Greek gods was, in part, written in Anatolia first.

The god who vanished

A distinctively Anatolian myth is that of the vanishing god, best preserved in the tale of Telipinu, a god of agriculture. Offended, Telipinu storms off in such a rage that "he put his right boot on his left foot and his left boot on his right," and with his departure the world dies: "trees withered, fields and springs dried up, oxen and sheep and women ceased to bear young, and famine crept over the world." The gods search frantically; at last a bee is sent to find and sting him awake, and through ritual appeasement he is soothed and brought home, and life returns. The myth was not told for entertainment but embedded in a ritual to recall an angry deity — a Bronze Age Anatolian version of the great pattern of the dying-and-returning god and the fertility that hangs on the divine presence.

Oath, treaty, and the confession of sin

Hittite religion left two things of unusual interest to the wider history of belief. First, the treaty. The Hittites were master diplomats, and their suzerain-vassal treaties — including the famous peace with Egypt after the Battle of Kadesh, the earliest surviving international treaty — invoked the gods of both sides as witnesses and enforcers of the sworn oath, with blessings for keeping it and curses for breaking it. Many scholars have noted that this treaty form closely resembles the structure of the biblical covenant between God and Israel (ch07) — a striking, if debated, formal parallel. Second, the plague prayers of Mursili II: when a plague ravaged the Hittites for twenty years, the king reasoned that a god must be angry, searched the old records, and concluded that his father's broken oath and neglected offerings had caused it — then confessed the inherited sin and begged the gods for relief. It is a remarkably developed theology of divine justice, inherited guilt, and the moral causation of history.

Ritual, magic, and the scribe

Hittite worship centered on a vast calendar of festivals that the king was obliged to celebrate, and on constant purification and magic rituals — many of them performed by ritual specialists, often the "Old Women" (ḫašawa), and preserved in meticulous written form. Divination was pervasive: the future was read in the flight of birds, in the entrails of sacrificed animals (extispicy), and by other omens, and no major royal decision was taken without consulting the gods. The Hittite scribes, working in both cuneiform and a separate Anatolian hieroglyphic (Luwian) script, produced one of the great multilingual archives of the ancient world.

The long Anatolian afterlife

When the Hittite empire collapsed around 1180 BCE in the great Bronze Age crisis, Anatolian religion did not vanish. The Luwians and the "Neo-Hittite" states of the early Iron Age carried its gods forward, and one Anatolian deity had an especially long future: Kubaba, a goddess of the region, developed into Kybele — Cybele, the great Mother of the Gods of Phrygia, whose ecstatic cult would be carried to Rome in 204 BCE as the Magna Mater (ch18, ch48). The thousand gods of Hatti outlived the empire that gathered them.

The believer's lens

For the Hittites, the land was ruled by the gods and the king was their servant and priest. The "thousand gods of Hatti" (native Hattian deities, gods of conquered and allied peoples, the gods of Hurrian neighbours) were gathered in, not driven out, and each had to be honoured correctly; in the rock sanctuary of Yazılıkaya the Storm-god and the Sun-goddess meet at the head of their divine processions. When the god Telipinu vanished in anger, the land withered, and ritual brought him home. Treaties were sworn before the gods as witnesses, and a broken oath brought divine punishment: when plague struck, King Mursili II searched out the sins of his father and confessed them in prayer to end it. To the Hittite worshipper, prosperity depended on the gods' presence and good will, and scribes, priests and king worked to keep it.

The skeptical lens

The historian has, for a Bronze Age religion, an unusually rich record: the cuneiform archives of Hattusa, written in the oldest attested Indo-European language; the Yazılıkaya reliefs; the Hittite–Egyptian treaty; the plague prayers of Mursili II; and the actual texts of the Kumarbi Cycle and the Telipinu myth. Scholars broadly accept that the Kumarbi Cycle, with its succession of heavenly kings, lies behind Hesiod's Theogony, but how and through whom it reached Greece is debated. The resemblance between Hittite treaties and the biblical covenant is real; whether it reflects direct influence or a shared Near Eastern convention is debated too. The "Hittites" of the Hebrew Bible are often a Canaanite group whose link with the Anatolian empire is uncertain. Much remains unknown: the older Hattian layer, and the meaning of rituals recorded only as step-by-step instructions.

Symbology and sacred encoding

• Yazılıkaya as stone theology. The rock sanctuary is a symbol-system in itself: the ordered procession of the whole pantheon encodes the divine hierarchy; the meeting of Teshub and Hepat at the center encodes the sacred marriage at the heart of the cosmos; and the panel where the god Sharruma embraces and protects King Tudhaliya encodes the king's intimate bond with his divine patron.
• The storm-god on the bull. The image of the weather-god striding on a bull, mace and lightning in hand, is the master-symbol of Anatolian (and wider Near Eastern) divine power — the same iconography that clothes Baal and, distantly, informs later sky-gods.
• The winged sun-disk, borrowed from Egypt and Mesopotamia, became the emblem of Hittite kingship — the ruler shielded by the radiant, winged sun of divine favor.
• Two scripts for the sacred. The Hittites encoded their religion in both imported cuneiform and their own monumental hieroglyphs, so that the same gods could be named in clay archives and carved on public rock — writing itself as an instrument of the cult.

Connections

Hittite religion sits among the great Bronze Age faiths, contemporary and in contact with Egypt and Mesopotamia (ch02, ch03) — its treaty with Egypt is the first in history. Its Kingship in Heaven is the direct ancestor of the Greek succession myth of Hesiod (ch08), one of the clearest cases of Near Eastern myth flowing into the West. Its vanishing god Telipinu belongs with the dying-and-returning god and the fertility-renewal pattern that runs through the whole archive (ch01, ch49). Its treaty-oath form is the debated model for the Israelite covenant (ch07). And its goddess Kubaba/Cybele carries Anatolian religion forward into the Roman mystery cults and the story of the Great Goddess (ch18, ch48).

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From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/chapters/ch57.html · a comparative library of the sacred.