Illuyanka: The Dragon-Slaying and the New Year

The signature myth of the Hittite storm-god is his combat with the dragon Illuyanka, preserved in two versions attached to the purulli festival, the great spring New Year rite. In the first, the god is at first beaten and wins only through a trick: the goddess Inara lays a feast, the dragon gorges himself too full to return to his den, and a mortal helper binds him.

In the second, darker version the dragon takes the god's heart and eyes, which he recovers through a marriage-alliance and the sacrifice of his own son. That the story was recited at the festival of the year's renewal marks it as a myth of cosmic order restored, the storm-god's victory guaranteeing the turning of the seasons, and it takes its place among the ancient Near East's and the wider Indo-European world's many combats of a sky-god against a serpent of chaos, from Marduk and Tiamat to Zeus and Typhon. The two versions are preserved on tablets from Hattusa itself, catalogued together by modern Hittitologists as CTH 321, and the first version names the mortal who binds the gorged dragon as Hupasiya, who demands Inara's love as his price and is later shut away and killed by the goddess after he breaks a taboo she had set him, a grim coda that ties the myth of cosmic renewal to a very human story of a bargain kept too literally.