Origin 1750 BCE to 1650 BCE
The state and popular religion of the Hittites, the Indo-European people who built an empire in Anatolia between about 1650 and 1180 BCE, celebrated in their own records as the land of a thousand gods. It was strikingly inclusive, absorbing the deities and rites of the earlier Hattians, of the Hurrians and of Mesopotamia, so that the storm-god was worshipped both as Hittite Tarhunt and Hurrian Teshub, and the queen of the gods both as the Sun-goddess of Arinna and as Hurrian Hebat. The king was high priest, and the great myths, the vanishing of Telipinu and the succession of divine kings in the Kumarbi cycle, were recited to keep the world in order. It is known from thousands of cuneiform tablets recovered at the capital Hattusa.
Facts
History
Era of Decline Era of DeclineHittite state religion ended with the collapse of the Hittite New Kingdom around 1200 BCE, after which its temple cults and pantheon passed out of continuous practice. 2 Status
Status TodayHistorical; not practised continuously 1 Belief
Supreme BeingHittite religion recognised a vast pantheon sometimes described in its own texts as the thousand gods of Hatti, headed by the storm god of Hatti and the sun goddess of Arinna. 2 TheologyPolytheistic: many gods 1 Origins
Origin Period Place of OriginAnatolia, centred on Hattusa 1 Practice
Practice StatusDiscontinued as a state religion 3 Sourced to the subject's own accountHittite state religion ended with the collapse of the Hittite Empire in the late Bronze Age and is known today through cuneiform archives recovered at its capital rather than continuous transmission. Learn More
The Thousand Gods of Hatti
Hittite religion was famously inclusive: the state cult boasted of worshipping "the thousand gods of Hatti," and the boast was close to literal. As the Hittite kingdom expanded across Anatolia and northern Syria it absorbed the gods of the peoples it conquered or encountered, the indigenous Hattian deities, the Hurrian gods who came to dominate the imperial period, and Mesopotamian and other Anatolian figures, and rather than replacing the old gods with new ones it added them, so the pantheon grew by accretion.
The king was the chief priest, responsible for the correct performance of an enormous calendar of festivals (the purulli New Year, the great AN.TAH.SUM spring festival, and many more), and a central Hittite conviction was that the gods must be served exactly and could be reasoned with: the surviving royal prayers argue, plead and even negotiate with the gods over plague and misfortune, treating the divine-human relationship as a kind of contract that both sides were bound to keep.
Recovered from the Archives of Hattusa
Hittite religion is a religion recovered from the ground and from a lost language relearned. It vanished with the collapse of the Hittite empire around 1200 BCE and was effectively forgotten until the excavation of the capital, Hattusa (modern Bogazkoy), from the early twentieth century turned up thousands of clay cuneiform tablets, the royal archives, including myths, prayers, festival scripts, ritual texts, treaties and omens.
The decipherment of the Hittite language by Bedrich Hrozny in 1915, which showed it to be Indo-European, unlocked them. Because so much of what survives is ritual text, instructions for festivals, incantations, the words of prayers, Hittite religion is unusually well known as practice, even where its theology stays implicit. It is thus a striking case of a completely dead religion, its living community gone for three thousand years, reconstructed in detail from its own documents rather than from any continuous tradition.
Correspondences & Relations
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Objects and Practices of This Tradition
She directed an inventory and reorganization of the cults of the kingdom, a project her son continued.
Regions Where This Is Principal
Related To
Hittite state religion absorbed the Hurrian pantheon and mythology wholesale from the 14th century BCE onward, chiefly through Kizzuwatna.
Sacred to This Deity
The archives of Hattusa are the principal source for Hittite religion.
Worship Of
Sources
1. Hittite Myths, 2nd edition
Harry A. Hoffner Jr. (Gary M. Beckman, ed.), Society of Biblical Literature (Writings from the Ancient World), 1998introduction and textsView the Source 1. Hittite Myths, 2nd edition
Harry A. Hoffner Jr. (Gary M. Beckman, ed.), Society of Biblical Literature (Writings from the Ancient World), 1998On Hittite religion and its mythsView the Source 2. Religions of Second Millennium Anatolia
Piotr Taracha, Harrassowitz Verlag (Dresdner Beitrage zur Hethitologie 27), 2009View the Source 3. Wikipedia, Hittite mythology and religion (source)
Wikipedia contributors, Wikipedia
Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005s.v. "Hittite Religion"View the Source Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
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