Kizzuwatna, the region around the Cilician plain, was where Hittite and Hurrian religion met and mixed. Its cult centres had absorbed Hurrian gods and Hurrian ritual technique for generations before Puduhepa was born, and Hittite kings had been importing its rites into the capital for almost as long. Her father Pentipsharri was a priest of Shaushka at Lawazantiya, and she grew up in that office and exercised it herself.
Hattusili, brother of the reigning king and then a provincial commander, married her on his way back from the Egyptian war. He tells the story himself in the apologia he wrote to justify his later seizure of the throne, and attributes the match to the instruction of a goddess in a dream. Whatever the mechanism, the marriage brought a trained Hurrian-rite priestess into the Hittite royal house at the moment that house was about to change hands.
What followed was a career of an unusual kind. Her seal appears beside her husband's on the Egyptian treaty. She wrote to Ramesses II directly, and one surviving letter answers his complaints about the delayed dowry with an argument about the state of the Hittite treasury that concedes nothing. She heard legal cases. She supervised an inventory and reorganization of the cults of the kingdom, a project her son continued, which involved recording local rites in writing and rationalizing what the state supported. She outlived Hattusili by a considerable margin and was still acting during the reign of her son, which makes her the longest-serving figure at the late Hittite court.