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.