Teshub, Hebat and the Kumarbi Cycle

Hurrian religion is known chiefly because the Hittites adopted it. Gernot Wilhelm's study sets out a pantheon headed by the storm god Teshub and the goddess Hebat, with the moon god Kushuh, the sun god Shimige, and Shaushka, a goddess of love and war whom the Hittites identified with Ishtar and whose image was sent from Nineveh to Egypt in the fourteenth century BCE to treat a pharaoh's illness.

The Kumarbi cycle is the tradition's most consequential text. It survives in Hittite translation and tells of succession in heaven. Alalu is overthrown by Anu, Kumarbi unmans Anu and becomes pregnant with gods thereby, Teshub is born and takes the kingship, and Kumarbi raises a stone monster against him. The pattern of divine generations violently displacing one another has long been compared with Hesiod's Theogony, and the resemblance is close enough that most scholars accept some line of transmission through Anatolia and north Syria into the Greek world, without agreeing on the route it took.

Hurrian ritual reached the Hittite court through the queens of the later empire, and the gods carved at Yazilikaya carry Hurrian names. The Hurrian hymns recovered at Ugarit include the earliest substantially notated music known, although how that notation should be performed remains disputed.