Hittites

Hittite religion was official policy as much as belief. As Hatti absorbed territory it absorbed the cults of that territory physically: the gods of a conquered place were carried to the capital, given offerings and added to the lists, and the phrase the thousand gods of Hatti appears in the treaties as a standing witness formula. The result is a pantheon of Hattian, Hurrian, Luwian and Mesopotamian layers in which the same deity often appears several times under different local names.

At the head stood the storm god of Hatti and the sun goddess of Arinna. The queen served as the sun goddess's chief priestess and the king served the storm god, so the royal couple were offices in the cult before they were anything else. Harry Hoffner's edition of the myths preserves the tradition's most distinctive story type, the disappearance of a god, in which Telipinu withdraws in anger and nothing grows until he is found and a rite of appeasement brings him back.

Itamar Singer's collection of the prayers shows the other side of the relation. They are legal in tone. The petitioner argues, cites precedent, offers restitution and asks that the cause of an affliction be identified, and the plague prayers of Mursili work through an inherited oath broken by his father as the explanation for an epidemic he did not cause.

The Hittites were entirely lost. They survived as a name in the Hebrew Bible and in Egyptian and Assyrian references and nothing more, until excavation at Bogazkoy in central Anatolia from 1906 uncovered the capital, Hattusa, and its archives of clay tablets. The demonstration in 1915 that the language was Indo-European made the empire readable, and Hittite remains the oldest attested Indo-European language.

The archives are why so much religious material survives. They preserve festival calendars specifying who stood where and what was said, ritual texts credited to named practitioners including a number of women, oracle enquiries conducted by several independent methods and then checked against each other, and the treaties whose divine witness lists are the fullest pantheon catalogues to survive from the ancient Near East.

The rock sanctuary at Yazilikaya, a natural cleft outside the capital, carries the pantheon in relief with the Hurrian names of the gods beside them, and it is the clearest surviving statement of what the imperial cult had become by the thirteenth century BCE. The empire collapsed around 1180 BCE in the wider Bronze Age breakdown, and the smaller Neo-Hittite states of southern Anatolia and northern Syria carried the name and the hieroglyphic script on for several centuries afterwards.