A Roll Call Before a Request

Before Muwatalli II's prayer ever states what he is asking for, it works methodically through an extended address to the Hittite state pantheon, naming deity after deity in turn, the Storm God of Hatti and the Sun Goddess of Arinna first, followed by a long sequence of other gods and goddesses drawn from across the Hittite empire's many local and regional cults. This structure, sometimes described by scholars of Hittite religion as a divine roll call, reflects a broader Hittite theological assumption running through much of the kingdom's royal prayer literature: that a king's affliction might have its cause anywhere within an enormous and only partly known pantheon, so a prayer seeking relief needed to name and invoke as many relevant deities as possible rather than risk overlooking the one actually responsible or able to help.

That same logic appears in the Hittite plague prayers already catalogued elsewhere in this atlas, where King Mursili II undertakes systematic divination specifically to identify which offence against which god has caused a national disaster, treating the identification itself as necessary work before any petition can succeed. Muwatalli's prayer takes a more exhaustive approach to the same underlying problem, addressing the full assembly directly rather than narrowing the search through prior divination, a difference in method that still serves an identical theological premise, that royal misfortune has a specific, findable divine cause, and identifying or addressing it correctly is what the prayer exists to accomplish.