Hurrians

Hurrian religion is known chiefly because the Hittites adopted it. Gernot Wilhelm's study sets out a pantheon headed by the storm god Teshub and the goddess Hebat, with the moon god Kushuh, the sun god Shimige, and Shaushka, a goddess of love and war whom the Hittites identified with Ishtar and whose image was sent from Nineveh to Egypt in the fourteenth century BCE to treat a pharaoh's illness.

The Kumarbi cycle is the tradition's most consequential text. It survives in Hittite translation and tells of succession in heaven. Alalu is overthrown by Anu, Kumarbi unmans Anu and becomes pregnant with gods thereby, Teshub is born and takes the kingship, and Kumarbi raises a stone monster against him. The pattern of divine generations violently displacing one another has long been compared with Hesiod's Theogony, and the resemblance is close enough that most scholars accept some line of transmission through Anatolia and north Syria into the Greek world, without agreeing on the route it took.

Hurrian ritual reached the Hittite court through the queens of the later empire, and the gods carved at Yazilikaya carry Hurrian names. The Hurrian hymns recovered at Ugarit include the earliest substantially notated music known, although how that notation should be performed remains disputed.

The Hurrians are attested from the late third millennium BCE in northern Mesopotamia, Syria and eastern Anatolia, and their language belongs to no large family. Its only established relative is Urartian, the language of the later kingdom around Lake Van. It was written in cuneiform, and the longest single Hurrian document is a letter from a king of Mitanni to an Egyptian pharaoh, found in the Amarna archive.

Mitanni, the state the Hurrians dominated in the second millennium, was a major power alongside Egypt, Hatti and Assyria, exchanging princesses and treaties with all three, and its capital has never been located. Its ruling class carries a puzzle that has never been resolved. A number of royal names, a treaty invoking deities whose names resemble Mitra, Varuna, Indra and the Nasatyas, and a horse training manual using Indo-Aryan numerals together point to an Indo-Aryan element inside a Hurrian speaking state, and how that element arrived is still argued.

Hurrian political independence ended with the Assyrian and Hittite partition of Mitanni in the fourteenth century BCE, but the population and its gods did not disappear with it. They were absorbed into both empires, which is why so much of what survives of Hurrian religion is preserved in a language other than Hurrian.