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The Hurrian Pantheon and Its Hittite Afterlife

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The Hurrian Pantheon and Its Hittite Afterlife

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.

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