Hurrian Religion

The central narrative of Hurrian religion, preserved in Hittite translation as the Kingship in Heaven and its sequels, tells of a violent succession among the gods. Alalu first held kingship in heaven, until his cupbearer Anu, the sky god, overthrew him. After nine years Anu was in turn attacked by his own cupbearer, Kumarbi, who bit off and swallowed Anu's genitals as Anu fled skyward. Anu warned Kumarbi that he now carried three terrible gods within him, and in time Kumarbi spat out or gave birth to Teshub, the storm god, who would grow to overthrow Kumarbi and take the kingship of the gods for himself. Kumarbi did not accept defeat quietly.

In the sequel known as the Song of Ullikummi, he fathered a monstrous being of solid stone, Ullikummi, on a great rock in the sea, hoping to raise a champion strong enough to blind and destroy Teshub. The story's pattern of a father god mutilated and overthrown by his son, who then faces a further monstrous challenger, closely parallels the Greek succession myth in Hesiod's Theogony, where Kronos castrates his father Uranus and is in turn overthrown by his own son Zeus, who defeats the monster Typhon. Most specialists in Near Eastern and Greek literature now treat the Hurrian material, transmitted through Hittite Anatolia and northern Syria, as a genuine source for this section of Hesiod, rather than a coincidence of independent invention.

Teshub, the storm god, headed the Hurrian pantheon, paired with his consort Hebat, a mother goddess later identified with the Hittite sun goddess of Arinna once the two religions merged. Their son Sharruma and Kumarbi, the deposed but still honoured former king of the gods, complete the core divine family that Hittite scribes carried into their own state religion. This transmission is most visible at Yazilikaya, a rock cut open air sanctuary near the Hittite capital Hattusa, where two long processions of deities are carved in relief, nearly all bearing Hurrian names, converging on a chamber built for the royal cult.

The channel for this transfer ran chiefly through Kizzuwatna, a buffer kingdom in south eastern Anatolia with a heavily Hurrian population, whose priests and ritual texts the Hittite court adopted wholesale from the 14th century BCE onward, especially under queen Puduhepa, herself of Hurrian and Kizzuwatnan origin. Because Hurrian civilisation left few texts in its own language once Mitanni fell to Assyria, most of what is known about Hurrian religion today survives only because Hittite scribes translated and archived it for their own use. The Hurrian gods therefore had a longer afterlife embedded in Hittite state religion than they ever had an independent literary record, and it is that borrowed record, rather than any purely Hurrian archive, that lets modern scholars reconstruct the religion at all.