Tarhunt (Teshub)

The signature myth of the Hittite storm-god is his combat with the dragon Illuyanka, preserved in two versions attached to the purulli festival, the great spring New Year rite. In the first, the god is at first beaten and wins only through a trick: the goddess Inara lays a feast, the dragon gorges himself too full to return to his den, and a mortal helper binds him.

In the second, darker version the dragon takes the god's heart and eyes, which he recovers through a marriage-alliance and the sacrifice of his own son. That the story was recited at the festival of the year's renewal marks it as a myth of cosmic order restored, the storm-god's victory guaranteeing the turning of the seasons, and it takes its place among the ancient Near East's and the wider Indo-European world's many combats of a sky-god against a serpent of chaos, from Marduk and Tiamat to Zeus and Typhon. The two versions are preserved on tablets from Hattusa itself, catalogued together by modern Hittitologists as CTH 321, and the first version names the mortal who binds the gorged dragon as Hupasiya, who demands Inara's love as his price and is later shut away and killed by the goddess after he breaks a taboo she had set him, a grim coda that ties the myth of cosmic renewal to a very human story of a bargain kept too literally.

The storm-god of Hatti is really two traditions fused. The native Anatolian thunderer is Tarhunt, his name built on a root meaning "to conquer, to be mighty"; the Hurrians, whose culture came to dominate the later empire, worshipped the same kind of god as Teshub, and in the imperial period the two merged so completely that the Hittite storm-god carries both identities at once. This layering is written into stone at Yazilikaya, the rock-cut sanctuary near the capital Hattusa, where the carved procession of the gods, led by the storm-god meeting his consort at the centre, is labelled in Hurrian names.

The doubling is characteristic of Hittite religion as a whole, which absorbed Hattian, Hurrian, Mesopotamian and Anatolian gods without discarding the old ones, producing a state cult that boasted of "the thousand gods of Hatti." At Yazilikaya the two great processions meet at the sanctuary's rear wall in the figures of the storm-god and his consort Hepat, the Hurrian sun-goddess, shown with their children Sharruma and Alanzu and a grandchild following behind, a family group carved in relief that gives the merged Tarhunt-Teshub not just a name but a full divine household, inscribed throughout in Hurrian rather than native Hittite, a striking indication of how thoroughly the imperial state cult had absorbed Hurrian theology by the time the sanctuary was carved.