A short walk from the city walls, a natural cleft in the rock was walled off and turned into a sanctuary. Along its sides two processions of figures advance towards each other and meet at the end, the gods from the left and the goddesses from the right, each named in Luwian hieroglyphs beside the head, with the storm god and the sun goddess at the centre. A smaller chamber holds a striking relief of a king embraced by his protecting god. The site has been read as the setting for a new year festival and as a memorial for the king who completed it, and the debate is unresolved; what is not in doubt is that the pantheon carved there is the Hurrian one the royal house had adopted.
The archives of the capital preserve the mythology behind those names. In the Kumarbi cycle, Anu the sky is overthrown by Kumarbi, who bites off and swallows his genitals, becomes pregnant from them, and gives birth to the storm god who will overthrow him in turn; Kumarbi then fathers a monster of stone, Ullikummi, grown on the shoulder of a giant in the sea, to unseat the new king of the gods.
Anyone who has read Hesiod will recognise the shape: sky, castration, swallowing, a son who displaces his father, a monstrous last challenger. Because the Hittite tablets are centuries older, they are among the strongest evidence that Greek theogony drew on Near Eastern material, and they came out of an archive found on this hilltop in 1906.