The Plague Prayers as Political and Religious Argument

In the fullest of the surviving Plague Prayers, Mursili II lays out two specific offenses he identifies as the cause of the plague afflicting his kingdom. The first involves a treaty sworn generations earlier between the Hittites and Egypt, the Kurustama treaty, which Mursili states his father Suppiluliuma I had broken by attacking Egyptian territory after Egypt itself had first approached the Hittites for help following the death of the young pharaoh Tutankhamun, an episode in which an Egyptian queen had requested a Hittite prince in marriage, an offer that ended badly when the prince sent, Zannanza, died before or shortly after reaching Egypt, an event Mursili's prayer treats as having poisoned relations and led to the broken oath. The second offense concerns the killing of Tudhaliya the Younger, a rival claimant to the Hittite throne whom Suppiluliuma had displaced, a killing Mursili frames as a violation of oaths sworn to the gods regardless of its political necessity at the time.

Having identified these causes, Mursili's prayers formally confess them on his father's behalf, since Suppiluliuma himself was already dead and beyond direct punishment, and ask the gods to transfer their anger from the Hittite people generally onto Mursili personally if punishment must continue, a rhetorical structure scholars read as an attempt to close off the disaster by taking formal religious and political responsibility for it in a way the kingdom's institutions could recognize as complete.