Kumarbi

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The tablet that carries the oldest version begins not with a god but with an invitation to listen. The scribe calls on the primeval deities to attend, the old powers who had withdrawn into the dark of the earth, and then sets down, reign by reign, who held the kingship in heaven. First in that line stands Alalu. He is not the point of the song. The point is the one who comes third, an elder already old when the storm-god is born — Kumarbi, called by the Hurrians the father of the gods, the deposed king who carried his own usurper in his body. The text that preserves him is written in Hittite, copied by the scribes of Ḫattuša from a Hurrian original, and it is, by the reckoning of the comparatists, the earliest written form of a story the ancient world would tell over and over: the son who unseats the father and takes heaven for his own.

The elder of the Hurrians

Kumarbi belonged to the Hurrians, the people of the upper Tigris and the north-Syrian plains who carried their gods west into the orbit of Hatti. His worship is attested from the eighteenth century BCE onward, and his oldest sanctuary was Urkesh — modern Tell Mozan in the foothills of the Taurus, the earliest Hurrian capital known, where, the foundation record states, the city-god was “Kumarbi, father of Teshup.” He was an elder god, set apart from the younger generation he had fathered and lost to, and his domains lay in the depths: he dwelt among the powers of the underworld, and in offering lists and ritual he stands at the border between the living surface of the world and what is beneath it.

The Hurrian scribes who copied his name into Mesopotamian script reached for a Sumerian sign to write him, and the sign they sometimes chose was the one for grain. Whether Kumarbi was in origin a god of the harvest is debated among Assyriologists; what is certain is that the tradition associated him with the prosperity of the cultivated earth, the swelling of seed in the ground — fitting for a deity whose body, in the central myth, becomes the ground in which the gods themselves are sown. When the Hurrian pantheon was set in equivalence with its neighbors, Kumarbi was matched abroad with the Mesopotamian Enlil of the older theology and with the Syrian Dagan, the grain-father; in the bilingual god-lists his name stands beside the Ugaritic El, the aged head of that western pantheon. He is, across all these traditions, the same kind of power: the old king, the father, the one the young storm-god supplants.

What can be said of him at all is said because the record was recovered, not because it was handed down. The Hurrians left no continuous literature of their own; their language survives in scattered ritual texts, in a long letter to a Pharaoh, and above all in the Hurrian songs the Hittite scribes translated and shelved. Kumarbi is known to us almost entirely through that filter — a Hurrian god read off Hittite tablets, his theogony preserved in a tongue not his own, dug out of the ruin-mound of a capital that burned in the twelfth century BCE. The names of his worship turn up at Mari and Nuzi, at Ugarit on the Syrian coast, and in the Hittite offering-rolls; but the figure who matters, the deposed father of the succession-song, comes to us as an archive recovers a thing rather than as a people remembers it.

Reliefs from Chamber B at Yazılıkaya, the open-air rock sanctuary above Ḫattuša, where the Hurrianized state pantheon — Teššub, Ḫebat, and the lesser gods — was carved into the living stone. Photograph by Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Hittites took him into their own worship, by way of the Hurrianizing currents that ran through the southern kingdom of Kizzuwatna and shaped the imperial cult. He appears in the offering-circle of the storm-god Teššub and is most likely among the gods carved in procession at the rock sanctuary of Yazılıkaya. Yet the place where Kumarbi truly lives in the record is not the relief or the offering-list. It is the great myth-cycle the scribes preserved on tablets in the archives — the songs that modern scholarship gathers under his name.

The succession of heaven

The Hurrian myth-cycle survives as a set of “songs,” compositions meant to be sung, copied into Hittite in the archives of Ḫattuša and grouped by their modern editors under five Hittite text-numbers. The foundation song is the one Hans Gustav Güterbock named the Song of Kumarbi; its colophon and content have also earned it the name the Song of Going-Forth or the Song of Emergence — the going-forth being the coming of the storm-god into the world. Its best-preserved copy was written in the first decades of the fourteenth century BCE, though the composition behind it is older. What it tells is a theogony: the order in which the kingship of heaven passed from hand to hand.

The song lays the succession out in plain order (the Kingship-in-Heaven myth). In the beginning Alalu was king in heaven, and Anu — the sky himself — stood before him as cupbearer and bowed at his feet. In the ninth year Anu rose against Alalu and overthrew him, and Alalu went down into the dark earth. Then Anu was king, and Kumarbi, scion of Alalu, stood before him as cupbearer and bowed at his feet. In the ninth year Kumarbi rose against Anu. The sky-god broke and fled upward, climbing toward heaven, but Kumarbi seized him by the feet and dragged him down, and bit into his body, and took the manhood of the sky into his own mouth and swallowed it.

The act is rendered in the song with no relish and no flinching — a sober line in a sober chronicle of who held heaven and how. And it has a consequence the swallower did not foresee. Anu, broken but laughing, turns and tells Kumarbi what he has done: he has taken into himself the seed of the gods, and is now made heavy with three of them — the storm-god Teššub, the river Aranzaḫ which is the Tigris, and the god Tašmišu, the storm-god’s brother and ally. Anu departs into the sky. Kumarbi, finding the seed bitter in him, spits, but the gods are already sown. He carries them, and in his time he comes to the city of Nippur, and there — the tablet breaking and resuming through these lines — the burden is brought forth. The fate-goddesses are summoned, his skull is opened, and the storm-god emerges into the light. This is the going-forth: Teššub comes out of the body of the father he will replace. There is, in the broken middle of the song, an exchange between the unborn storm-god and Kumarbi over which way he shall come out — a council of the gods within the elder’s own body before the birth — and a moment, paralleled in the later Greek tradition, when Kumarbi means to devour the newborn and is given a stone in his place, breaking his teeth on it. The grain that swelled in him has become the storm that breaks him.

What follows in the cycle is the long counter-assault of an old king who will not stay deposed. Teššub wins the kingship of heaven — and Kumarbi, cast down, sets out to win it back not in his own person but through champions he fathers upon the world to be his weapons. In the Song of Ḫedammu he begets a voracious sea-serpent. In the Song of Silver he raises up a being who briefly holds the throne. And in the most fully preserved of these, the Song of Ullikummi, he fathers his greatest weapon upon a great cold rock.

Ullikummi, the stone grown to heaven

Ullikummi, in the song that bears his name, is a giant of diorite stone — sentient but blind and deaf, without the senses by which a god might be reasoned with or deceived. Kumarbi has him hidden away in the depths and set on the right shoulder of Upelluri, an ancient titan who stands in the netherworld bearing the weight of earth and sky on his body, so old and so vast that he does not notice the stone child growing on him any more than he had noticed, long before, when heaven and earth were first built upon him. There Ullikummi grows. He grows in the sea until the water reaches only his waist; he rises like a tower; he climbs toward heaven itself, and when the Sun-goddess looks down she sees him and is afraid, and goes to warn the storm-god.

Teššub goes up against him with thunder and rain and the whole muster of the gods, and it is no use — the stone has no ears for thunder and no eyes for the lightning, and it cannot be moved. The storm-god is beaten back and his kingship trembles. The deliverance comes not by force but by memory. The wise god Ea — the deep-water god of the old Mesopotamian theology, the Enki of Sumer — goes down to the storehouses of the primeval gods and brings out the ancient copper cutting-tool, the very blade with which, in the first days, heaven had been sawn apart from earth. With it the gods cut Ullikummi free at the base, severing him from the shoulder of Upelluri where his strength was rooted. Unmoored from the foundation of the world, the giant can be brought down, and the storm-god’s kingship holds.

The twelve gods of the underworld, carved in a running file on the west wall of Chamber B at Yazılıkaya — the powers of the depths to which Kumarbi belonged. Photograph by Carole Raddato, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The shape of the whole cycle is plain once it is laid out. The kingship of heaven is a thing held in succession, taken by force, and defended against the one it was taken from. Kumarbi is the hinge of it: the son who overthrew the sky and the father whom the storm-god overthrew, the swallower who became the swallowed-in, the grain-elder whose own body was the field in which his conqueror grew. The myth is not a tale of a monster for its own sake. It is a chronicle of the generations of the gods, told with the gravity a theogony asks for.

The forerunner of Hesiod

When the Hittite tablets of Ḫattuša were read in the twentieth century, classicists recognized the story. In the Theogony of Hesiod, set down in Greek some six or seven centuries after these copies were written, the kingship of heaven passes through a line: Ouranos, the sky, is the first king; Kronos his son rises against him and castrates him with a blade, cutting away the father’s manhood; Kronos in his turn swallows his own children to keep the throne, until Zeus the storm-god is saved by a stone given in his place and grows to depose him. Set the two lines beside each other and they answer point for point. Anu the sky stands where Ouranos stands; Kumarbi, who unmans the sky and then would swallow the child, stands where Kronos stands; Teššub the storm-king who emerges and takes heaven stands where Zeus stands. The castration of the sky-father is in both. The swallowing — and the stone substituted for the swallowed god — is in both, displaced between the figures but unmistakably the same matter.

That the Hurro-Hittite material is the older form, and that the Greek succession-myth descends in some fashion from this eastern stock, is among the firmer results of comparative mythology. Güterbock, who first set the texts side by side, titled his study of them as the “Oriental Forerunners of Hesiod,” and the later syntheses of Walter Burkert and M. L. West built the case out at length, placing Hesiod’s poem within a wide web of West-Asiatic motifs that reached the Aegean. The kinship is not seriously contested.

What is contested is the road. No one can yet trace the line by which a Bronze-Age Hurrian song became an eighth-century Greek poem across the silence between them. The favored bridge runs through the cities of the north-Syrian coast and the Phoenicians of Byblos and their neighbors — and Güterbock pointed in particular to the Phoenician History attributed to Philo of Byblos, whose own divine succession seemed to him a stage between Kumarbi and Hesiod. Other scholars have doubted that any one surviving text can be called an intermediary at all, and the mechanism — oral, scribal, by way of which intermediaries and over how many centuries — stays open. The parallel is secure; the route is argued.

Carved gods in Chamber A of the Yazılıkaya sanctuary, where the imperial Hurrianized pantheon of Hatti was set into the rock. Photograph by Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Afterward

In the first millennium, after the great kingdom had fallen, the elder god did not wholly vanish. Among the Luwian-speaking peoples of the Iron-Age successor states, a form of his name, Kumarma, surfaces in the hieroglyphic-Luwian inscriptions of Karkamish and the Euphrates towns — the grain-father carried forward under a new tongue. But his lasting station is the one the cuneiform archive secured for him. The thirty thousand tablets recovered from Ḫattuša preserved, in a foreign script and a foreign language, a Hurrian theology that would otherwise have left almost no trace — and among them the songs that make Kumarbi the earliest named bearer of a story the ancient Mediterranean could not stop telling.

He is the deposed king who fathered his own deposer; the elder of the depths who swallowed the seed of heaven and bore the storm in his body; the father against whom the son makes war, and over whom the son prevails. That figure stands at the head of Anu and Teššub in the Hurrian line and at the head of Ouranos, Kronos, and Zeus in the Greek — one shape behind both, written first on the tablets of the Hittite scribes. The grain-elder of a vanished people turns out to hold the oldest copy of how the kingship of heaven changed hands.

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