Kumarbi

Kumarbi is the deposed former king of the gods in the Hurrian mythology the Hittites took over, and the myths named for him, the Kumarbi cycle, contain one of the most discussed parallels in the study of ancient religion. In the Song of Kumarbi he overthrows the sky-god Anu by biting off and swallowing his genitals, and is thereby made pregnant with the storm-god Teshub and other deities who are born from him and displace him in turn; in the later Song of Ullikummi he raises a monstrous stone giant to unseat the storm-god. This sequence, a violent succession of divine generations, a castration, a swallowing, and a young storm-god who wins the kingship of heaven, corresponds so closely to the succession of Ouranos, Kronos and Zeus in Hesiod's Theogony that most scholars accept some line of transmission from the Near East to early Greece. Kumarbi thus stands at a crucial junction in the history of myth: the elder god who will not stop plotting to regain heaven, and a probable ancestor of a central Greek story.

The tablets preserving the Kumarbi cycle were recovered among the tens of thousands of cuneiform documents excavated at Hattusa, the Hittite capital near modern Bogazkoy in Turkey, in a series of German led excavations beginning in 1906 under Hugo Winckler, whose team uncovered the royal archives that would eventually transform scholarly understanding of Hittite civilization, previously known chiefly through scattered references in Egyptian and biblical sources rather than from its own extensive written record. Deciphering and connecting the specific tablets that make up the Kumarbi cycle, the Song of Kumarbi, the Song of Ullikummi and related fragments, took decades of philological work, and the scholar most responsible for establishing the texts in readable form and drawing out their significance for comparative mythology was Hans Gustav Guterbock, whose editions and studies from the 1940s and 1950s laid out the sequence of divine castration, swallowing and succession that so closely parallels Hesiod's Theogony.

Guterbock's work reshaped how classicists as well as Hittitologists understood the origins of Greek mythology, since it demonstrated that a succession myth long assumed a distinctively Greek invention had a documented Near Eastern precursor centuries older than Hesiod, transmitted westward by some route still debated, plausibly through contact in Cyprus, coastal Anatolia or northern Syria before Hesiod composed his own poem. The Kumarbi cycle is accordingly as important a case study in the history of classical scholarship, showing how a mid-twentieth century philological recovery could overturn assumptions about Greek cultural originality, as it is a myth in its own right.