El's reach extended well beyond Ugarit and Canaan proper: Hittite scribes in Anatolia preserved a mythological text, generally called Elkunirsa and Ashertu after its two main figures, in which a god named Elkunirsa, a name transparently derived from the West Semitic epithet El qoneh 'arts, El creator of the earth, appears as an aged high god married to the goddess Ashertu, a clear borrowing of the Canaanite pairing of El and Athirat carried into Hittite religious literature through the considerable cultural contact between Anatolia and the Semitic-speaking Levant during the second millennium BCE. In the surviving fragments of the tale, Ashertu attempts to seduce the storm-god, here called simply the Storm-god rather than by Baal's own name, and when he rebuffs her and reports the attempt to Elkunirsa, the aged god instructs the Storm-god to humiliate Ashertu in turn, a narrative structure that broadly echoes the dynamic of the Ugaritic Baal Cycle, in which El presides at a careful distance while younger, more active gods such as Baal contend directly with one another and occasionally test or offend the patriarch's own household.
The Hittite adaptation demonstrates that El's specific profile, an aged, authoritative creator-patriarch who presides over disputes rather than fighting them himself, travelled successfully across a real linguistic and cultural boundary from a West Semitic religious milieu into an Indo-European-speaking Anatolian one, evidence that El's particular theological character, and not merely his name, was recognized and considered worth preserving by scribes working in an entirely different language and religious tradition centuries before the Ugaritic tablets that give us our fullest picture of El were inscribed.