The tablets preserving the Kumarbi cycle were recovered among the tens of thousands of cuneiform documents excavated at Hattusa, the Hittite capital near modern Bogazkoy in Turkey, in a series of German led excavations beginning in 1906 under Hugo Winckler, whose team uncovered the royal archives that would eventually transform scholarly understanding of Hittite civilization, previously known chiefly through scattered references in Egyptian and biblical sources rather than from its own extensive written record. Deciphering and connecting the specific tablets that make up the Kumarbi cycle, the Song of Kumarbi, the Song of Ullikummi and related fragments, took decades of philological work, and the scholar most responsible for establishing the texts in readable form and drawing out their significance for comparative mythology was Hans Gustav Guterbock, whose editions and studies from the 1940s and 1950s laid out the sequence of divine castration, swallowing and succession that so closely parallels Hesiod's Theogony.
Guterbock's work reshaped how classicists as well as Hittitologists understood the origins of Greek mythology, since it demonstrated that a succession myth long assumed a distinctively Greek invention had a documented Near Eastern precursor centuries older than Hesiod, transmitted westward by some route still debated, plausibly through contact in Cyprus, coastal Anatolia or northern Syria before Hesiod composed his own poem. The Kumarbi cycle is accordingly as important a case study in the history of classical scholarship, showing how a mid-twentieth century philological recovery could overturn assumptions about Greek cultural originality, as it is a myth in its own right.