The storm-god of Hatti is really two traditions fused. The native Anatolian thunderer is Tarhunt, his name built on a root meaning "to conquer, to be mighty"; the Hurrians, whose culture came to dominate the later empire, worshipped the same kind of god as Teshub, and in the imperial period the two merged so completely that the Hittite storm-god carries both identities at once. This layering is written into stone at Yazilikaya, the rock-cut sanctuary near the capital Hattusa, where the carved procession of the gods, led by the storm-god meeting his consort at the centre, is labelled in Hurrian names.
The doubling is characteristic of Hittite religion as a whole, which absorbed Hattian, Hurrian, Mesopotamian and Anatolian gods without discarding the old ones, producing a state cult that boasted of "the thousand gods of Hatti." At Yazilikaya the two great processions meet at the sanctuary's rear wall in the figures of the storm-god and his consort Hepat, the Hurrian sun-goddess, shown with their children Sharruma and Alanzu and a grandchild following behind, a family group carved in relief that gives the merged Tarhunt-Teshub not just a name but a full divine household, inscribed throughout in Hurrian rather than native Hittite, a striking indication of how thoroughly the imperial state cult had absorbed Hurrian theology by the time the sanctuary was carved.