Šauška vs Tarhunna (the Storm-god of Hatti)

Hurrian goddess of love and war and sister of the storm-god Teššub, who in the Kumarbi cycle tries to overcome her brother's monstrous enemies by seduction.

Šauška is the Hurrian goddess whom Hittite scribes wrote with the sign for the Mesopotamian Ištar; her most famous cult was at Nineveh. She was a goddess of both love and war and could appear in male as well as female form. She became personally important to the Hittite royal family: King Hattusili III named her as his protective goddess in his autobiographical *Apology*.

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.