Arinniti (Sun-goddess of Arinna)

The Sun-goddess of Arinna, invoked as Arinniti, was not a mere personification of the sun but the sovereign goddess of the Hittite state, patroness of its kings and queens and, with the storm-god her consort, the summit of the official pantheon. Her importance is clearest in the royal prayers, above all those of the powerful thirteenth-century queen Puduhepa, who addressed her as queen of heaven and earth, giver of justice and rule to the king.

Behind Arinniti lie older and other figures: the earlier Hattian goddess Wurusemu, and, in the Hurrianising layer of the empire's religion, the great goddess Hebat, with whom she was identified. That a solar deity should be the guarantor of kingship rather than a distant celestial body is characteristic of the Near East, where the sun is the god of justice who sees all; the Sun-goddess of Arinna stands at the exact centre of Hittite royal religion.

Beyond Puduhepa's later royal prayers, the Sun-goddess of Arinna appears at the center of one of the most remarkable surviving texts of Hittite religion: the so called Plague Prayers of Mursili II, a set of compositions in which the thirteenth century BCE king, facing a devastating epidemic that had already killed his father and continued for years into his own reign, addresses the gods including the Sun-goddess of Arinna directly, searching through old records for the specific broken oath or neglected offering that might have provoked the disaster and offering elaborate confession and restitution in the hope of ending it. The prayers are strikingly personal and legalistic at once, treating the plague as a matter the king could investigate and potentially resolve by identifying the specific divine grievance behind it, and they name the Sun-goddess of Arinna alongside the storm-god as among the chief powers capable of lifting the affliction, consistent with her established role as the sovereign guarantor of justice between the king and the gods.

The Plague Prayers survive on cuneiform tablets recovered from the Hittite capital at Hattusa and are read today as one of the richest windows available into how a Hittite king understood his own personal responsibility for his people's suffering, a theology in which royal misconduct or oversight, not merely impersonal misfortune, could bring divine punishment on the whole land, and in which the Sun-goddess of Arinna's favor, sought here in a moment of genuine crisis rather than routine ceremony, was treated as inseparable from the nation's physical survival.