Hattusa

Hittite religion had a policy, and the texts state it: when a territory was taken, its gods were brought to Hattusa and added to the cult. The result is the formula used to invoke divine witnesses to a treaty, the thousand gods of Hatti, followed by lists that run for columns and include deities of Hattian, Hurrian, Luwian and Mesopotamian origin alongside mountains, rivers and springs. At the head stood the sun goddess of Arinna and the storm god, and the king ruled as their steward.

Kingship was a priesthood in practice as well as in theory. Festival texts occupied the king for months of the year, travelling a circuit of towns to perform the required rites in order, and campaigns were arranged around them. A remarkable document of instructions to temple personnel regulates the whole staff: what they may eat, how they must wash, that they must not let the god's bread be stolen, that anyone who says the god will not notice is deceiving himself.

The plague prayers of Mursili II are the most striking texts of all. Faced with an epidemic that had run for twenty years, the king consults oracles to find its cause, learns that his father had broken a treaty oath and killed a rightful heir, and prays as a son inheriting a guilt he did not incur, admitting the fault, offering restitution and arguing with the gods that killing the population will leave nobody to feed them. It is a religion of contract, and the king is making a case.

A short walk from the city walls, a natural cleft in the rock was walled off and turned into a sanctuary. Along its sides two processions of figures advance towards each other and meet at the end, the gods from the left and the goddesses from the right, each named in Luwian hieroglyphs beside the head, with the storm god and the sun goddess at the centre. A smaller chamber holds a striking relief of a king embraced by his protecting god. The site has been read as the setting for a new year festival and as a memorial for the king who completed it, and the debate is unresolved; what is not in doubt is that the pantheon carved there is the Hurrian one the royal house had adopted.

The archives of the capital preserve the mythology behind those names. In the Kumarbi cycle, Anu the sky is overthrown by Kumarbi, who bites off and swallows his genitals, becomes pregnant from them, and gives birth to the storm god who will overthrow him in turn; Kumarbi then fathers a monster of stone, Ullikummi, grown on the shoulder of a giant in the sea, to unseat the new king of the gods.

Anyone who has read Hesiod will recognise the shape: sky, castration, swallowing, a son who displaces his father, a monstrous last challenger. Because the Hittite tablets are centuries older, they are among the strongest evidence that Greek theogony drew on Near Eastern material, and they came out of an archive found on this hilltop in 1906.