Hittite

The Hittites called their gods the thousand gods of Hatti, and they meant it as a description of policy. As the kingdom absorbed Hattian, Hurrian, Luwian and Mesopotamian populations it absorbed their gods, and treaties invoke long lists of them by name and by city. This is a pantheon assembled by an empire that saw no advantage in editing.

At the head is a pair rather than a king. The storm god of Hatti and the sun goddess of Arinna rule together, and both are named first in the oaths that mattered most. Joint sovereignty of that kind is uncommon, and it is one of the sharpest contrasts the atlas can draw with the Greek or Norse arrangement.

The succession myth is the most consequential text the Hittites preserved, and it is Hurrian in origin. Alalu is king in heaven and is overthrown by Anu; Anu is overthrown by Kumarbi, who bites off and swallows his genitals and is thereby made pregnant with the storm god who will overthrow him in turn. The resemblance to Hesiod's account of Ouranos, Kronos and Zeus is close enough that the relationship between the two is a standing question in the study of early Greek poetry.

The king is the chief priest in life and a god in death. The Hittite idiom for a king's death is that he became a god, and royal funerary ritual and later cult follow from it.

The Hittites vanished from history and were recovered from a single archive within about a century.

Excavation at Bogazkoy, ancient Hattusa, from the beginning of the twentieth century recovered thousands of clay tablets from the royal archives. Because the Hittites wrote in Mesopotamian cuneiform, the script was already readable when the tablets were found, but the language was not; it was deciphered when it was recognised as Indo-European, which made it the earliest attested language of that family and reorganised the study of the whole group.

What the archive contains shapes what can be said. It is a state archive: treaties, edicts, annals, land grants, and above all ritual and festival texts, prayers and instructions for temple personnel. The Hittites were meticulous about how ceremonies were to be conducted, and the corpus records the machinery of state religion in extraordinary detail.

It also contains texts in several other languages, including Hurrian and Hattic material transmitted by Hittite scribes, so the archive preserves the religion of neighbours who left no archive of their own.

The prayers are the most personal material to survive. Those of Mursili II, composed during a plague, argue with the gods, examine what offence might have caused it, and are among the most direct religious documents from the ancient Near East.

Yazilikaya, the rock sanctuary outside the capital, supplies the visual counterpart: the gods carved in procession, labelled.