Kumarbi vs Tarhunna (the Storm-god of Hatti)

Hurrian father of the gods who seizes kingship in heaven by biting off the sky-god Anu's loins, unwittingly conceives the storm-god Teššub, and spends the rest of the Kumarbi cycle fathering monsters to overthrow him.

Kumarbi belongs to the Hurrian pantheon of northern Syria and Upper Mesopotamia. His city was Urkeš (modern Tell Mozan in northeastern Syria), one of the oldest Hurrian centres, and he was equated in god-lists with the Mesopotamian grain-god Dagan and with Enlil. Everything known of his mythology comes from Hurrian songs preserved mainly in Hittite translation at Hattusa: the Song of Kumarbi (CTH 344), the Song of Hedammu (CTH 348), and the Song of Ullikummi (CTH 345).

The chief god of the Hittite state: a storm-god of rain and thunder who gives the land its fertility, fights the serpent Illuyanka, and, under his Hurrian name Teššub, wins kingship in heaven in the Kumarbi cycle.

Hittite scribes usually wrote the storm-god's name with a Sumerian word-sign (dU or dIŠKUR, "the Storm-god"), so the Hittite reading is partly reconstructed; Tarḫunna is the most widely accepted reading, and the Luwian form Tarḫunt survived into the first millennium BCE. The same logogram covered the Hattian storm-god Taru and, from the fifteenth century onward, the Hurrian storm-god Teššub, whom the later Hittite royal family, closely tied to Hurrian Kizzuwatna, promoted to the head of the state cult. On this site these are treated as one entry because the Hittite sources themselves write them with one sign, but readers should know that the Hattian, Hittite, and Hurrian storm-gods had separate origins and were brought together by scribes and kings.