A Personal God With No Recorded Name

One of the most striking features of Kantuzili's prayer, and a feature it shares with the wider genre of Hittite and Mesopotamian personal prayers, is that the deity addressed is never named in the surviving text, referred to only as "my god," a personal patron distinct from the great state gods of the Hittite pantheon who received the kingdom's public cult. This concept of a personal god, a deity understood to stand in something like a private, almost familial relationship to a single individual or household, quite apart from that individual's obligations to the state pantheon, is well attested across the wider ancient Near East and gives texts like Kantuzili's their peculiar intimacy: the complaint is not addressed to Hatti's storm god or sun goddess in their public capacity but to a smaller, more personal figure whose entire relevance is the wellbeing of one person and that person's household.

Hittite Prayers, the standard modern collection and translation of this material, situates Kantuzili's text among a broader corpus of Hittite royal and personal prayers recovered from the archives at Hattusa, most of which are addressed to named state deities on behalf of the kingdom, which makes Kantuzili's private, personal address to an unnamed god the exception within the corpus rather than the rule, and part of why it has drawn sustained scholarly attention as evidence for a level of Hittite religious life largely invisible in the kingdom's official ritual texts.