Tarhunna (the Storm-god of Hatti)

One god, several names

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.

Storm-god of Hatti and local storm-gods

The Storm-god of Hatti was the king's divine lord; the king called himself the god's administrator, and treaties invoked the storm-god first among the divine witnesses. Alongside him, dozens of local storm-gods had their own cult cities, the most important being the Storm-god of Nerik and the Storm-god of Zippalanda, both regarded as his sons in cult texts. His sacred animals were two bulls, named Šeri and Hurri in Hurrian tradition, which draw his chariot.

In the myths

In the Anatolian Illuyanka tales, recited at the Purulli festival of Nerik, the storm-god is first defeated by the serpent Illuyanka and wins only with the help of others: the goddess Inara and her mortal helper Hupašiya in one version, and his own mortal son in the other. In the Hurrian Kumarbi cycle he appears as Teššub, conceived when Kumarbi swallows the seed of the sky-god Anu, born out of Kumarbi's body, and victorious in the struggle for kingship in heaven, though he loses his first battle against the stone giant Ullikummi and needs the wisdom of Ea to win. That pattern, a storm-king who is beaten before he triumphs, runs through both strands of his mythology.