A Kingdom That Borrowed Its Gods Freely

Hittite religion is notable among ancient Near Eastern traditions for its explicit and extensive incorporation of deities and religious practices from the many different peoples within and bordering the Hittite realm, including Hattian, Hurrian and Mesopotamian religious elements, so thoroughly blended that Hittite religious texts themselves sometimes refer to the empire's pantheon as encompassing a thousand gods, a phrase scholars read as reflecting genuine, deliberate religious pluralism rather than mere poetic exaggeration, distinguishing Hittite religious policy from the more singular focus of some neighboring traditions. This documented openness to religious incorporation is part of why Hittite prayers, including the personally attributed royal prayers that make this corpus distinctive, address a wide range of specific deities, including the Sun Goddess of Arinna prominent in Puduhepa's prayer, drawn from this broader blended pantheon rather than from a single fixed core group of deities maintained without outside influence. This entry records the corpus as a whole and the specific archaeological circumstance and religious character that make Hittite evidence unusually rich and personally detailed among Bronze Age Near Eastern prayer traditions.