Tarhunna

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A scribe writing out a treaty for the Great King of Hatti would reach, near the head of the long roll of divine witnesses, for a single fixed name: the storm-god of Hatti. Before the local gods of a hundred towns, before the river-gods and the mountain-gods and the gods whose names survive only as names, the storm-god stood as the chief guarantor of the sworn word. Break the oath, and it was his thunder that would answer. The god who held that office across the Anatolian plateau in the second millennium before the present era was Tarḫunna — Hittite Tarḫunna or Tarḫunt-, Luwian Tarḫunz, the bull-and-thunderbolt sovereign of the gods, lord of the rain and the harvest, and the warrant of the king’s rule.

The storm of the mountains

His name is a verb made flesh. The Hittite tarḫu-zi means “to prevail, to conquer, to be powerful, to be able, to defeat,” and from that root the Anatolian languages built their storm-god’s name across the whole family — Hittite Tarḫunna, Luwian Tarḫunz, and in the later western dialects the Lycian Trqqas and the Carian and Milyan forms that carried the same syllable down into the Iron Age. The god was, in his very name, the one who overcomes. (Tarḫunna sets out the etymology and the cognate forms.)

Tarḫunna was not the first storm-god of Anatolia. The incoming speakers of Hittite, an Indo-European tongue, found the plateau already held by the Ḫattians — the indigenous people whose gods and whose tongue the newcomers took up and made their own. The storm-god they inherited was in part the Ḫattian Taru, and beside him stood a whole company of weather-powers belonging to particular places: the storm-god of Nerik in the north, the storm-god of Zippalanda by its holy mountain, the storm-god of this town and that. The Hittite state did not always melt these into one figure. As the record bears witness, many Hittite towns kept their own storm-gods and declined to read the local deity as merely a mask of a single national god — the weather-power was felt as plural, rooted in the rain that fell on each valley. Yet over them all rose the storm-god of Hatti, the storm-god of the capital and the kingdom, and it is this figure whom the moderns name Tarḫunna and set at the head of the pantheon. The deep substrate behind him belongs to the Hattians, the people whose sacred world the Hittites absorbed; the wider company of his worshipers spread among the Luwians of the south and west, who carried his cult longest of all.

He is drawn as a power of the high country. In Hittite and imperial art the storm-god is a bearded man in a pointed cap, a mace or a scepter in one hand and a three-pronged thunderbolt in the other, standing on the backs of two mountain-gods — Namni and Ḫazzi, the peaks made divine. His sacred beast is the bull. The animal may stand alone as his sign, or the god may ride upon its back, or a pair of bulls may draw his chariot. The thunder was understood, in the most literal register of the cult, as the bellowing of the god’s bull across the sky; the lightning was the weapon in his hand. In the Hurrian reckoning the two bulls that drew or flanked him bore names — Šeri and Ḫurri, Day and Night by one reading — and the pairing of god and bull runs so deep in Anatolian art that the animal could stand for the god with no figure at all. Behind the bronze and the carved stone lies a god whose domain was the whole working of the weather — thunder and lightning, the cloud and the rain, and so the difference between fertile fields and a land gone dry. He ruled the heavens and the mountains; he watched, the texts say, over the kingdom and its institutions, and over the borders and the roads as well, the storm-power extended into a guardianship of the whole ordered world. Britannica’s entry on the Anatolian Tarhun keeps the iconography exact: the three-pronged bolt in one hand, the club or axe in the other, the bull beneath or beside him.

Bronze figurine of the storm-god standing upon a bull, from Carchemish, c. 1400–1200 BC (National Museum of Denmark). Photograph by Eunostos, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

His household places him at the center of the state’s divine family. His consort was the Sun-goddess of Arinna, the queen of heaven and earth and the lady of the Hittite land; their children included the vanishing god Telipinu, keeper of the land’s fertility, and the goddesses Mezzulla and Inara. Storm-god and Sun-goddess together formed the royal pair at the summit of what the Hittites themselves called, with a phrase that has stayed in every modern account, the “thousand gods of Hatti” — a pantheon so wide that, as one survey of the religion notes, a staggering number of its members survive in the inscriptions as nothing now but names. (Hittite mythology and religion gathers the pantheon and the phrase.)

The dragon and the oath

Two things made Tarḫunna more than one weather-god among many: he answered for the kingship, and he had killed the dragon.

The kingship first. The Hittite Great King ruled, in the theology of the state, as the storm-god’s appointed man. The land and the household were the god’s; the king held them in trust. A ritual formula puts it plainly — the gods, it runs, have entrusted to the king the land and his house — and the whole apparatus of the monarchy rested on that entrustment. The clearest expression of the office lies in the treaties. When Hatti bound a vassal or a foreign king by oath, the agreement closed with a long list of gods summoned to witness and to punish, and at or near the head of that list stood the storm-god of Hatti, the chief divine guarantor of the sworn word. Religion was the binding force of Bronze-Age diplomacy: the gods of both parties were called to stand surety, and the storm-god of Hatti stood first among Hatti’s. To break faith with the king was to break faith with the god whose thunder backed him. The oath was no formality. The god-lists ran to dozens of names — the storm-gods of the towns, the Sun-goddess of Arinna, the tutelary gods, the war-gods, the rivers and mountains and springs of the land — and they were summoned not only to hear the oath but to enforce it, to fall upon the perjurer and his house and his line. In that machinery the storm-god of Hatti was the keystone: the power whose favor the Great King held, and to whom, in prayer, the king answered when the land suffered plague or defeat. The same theology that made the king the god’s steward made him the god’s debtor; when the rains failed or the armies broke, it was understood as the storm-god’s anger, and the king’s task was to find the sin and make it good.

The dragon second. The great combat of the Anatolian storm-god is the tale of Illuyanka — the name is simply the Anatolian word for “serpent” or “dragon” — and it survives in two versions on a single body of cuneiform tablets, cataloged by scholars as the text known in the field as CTH 321, set down by a priest and recited at the spring festival. In the first version the storm-god meets the dragon Illuyanka and is beaten. He turns for help to the goddess Inara, who lays a great feast and, when the dragon has come up and gorged himself on the food and drink, has the mortal man Ḫupašiya bind the serpent fast with rope while he is too swollen to slip back into his hole. The storm-god then comes with the other gods and slays him. In the second version the defeat is worse: the dragon takes the storm-god’s eyes and his heart. To win them back the storm-god fathers a son on the daughter of a poor man, and when the son is grown he is married to the daughter of Illuyanka, and is told to ask, as his bride-gift, for the stolen eyes and heart. The gift is given, the god is made whole, and he goes again to the sea to fight. There the tale turns dark: the son, bound now by his place in the dragon’s house, asks to die with it, and the storm-god kills both the dragon and his own son. The renewal is bought at a price. (Illuyanka gives both versions and the textual catalog.)

The combat was not a tale told for its own sake. It belonged to the purulli festival — the great spring festival of the new year, whose name was understood in connection with the earth — and the king attended its recitation. The slaying of the dragon was tied to the turn of the year and the return of the land’s fertility: the storm-god’s victory over the serpent of drought and chaos was the warrant that the rains would come, the fields would bear, and the cycle of the year would hold. To recite the combat at the spring festival was to enact, in the king’s presence, the renewal on which the kingdom lived.

The İvriz relief: King Warpalawas of Tuwana before the storm-god Tarhunzas, who holds ears of grain and clusters of grapes; late 8th century BC, near Ereğli, Konya province. Photograph by Klaus-Peter Simon, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.

Tarḫunna and Teššub

There is one distinction the record insists on, and it is easy to blur. The Hittite-Luwian storm-king was not the only god to hold the office of weather-sovereign in the Bronze-Age Near East. In the Hurrian world to the south and east, the same office belonged to Teššub, the storm-god who won the kingship of heaven from the deposed elder Kumarbi and reigned with his consort Ḫebat. Tarḫunna and Teššub were two distinct gods of two distinct peoples, holding parallel offices — each the storm-king at the head of his own pantheon.

As Hurrian culture pressed deeper into Hatti from the Middle Hittite period onward, the Hittites came to identify their weather-god with the Hurrian Teššub, and in the empire’s last century the two were drawn close to merging. The full conflation of deities was, in Hittite religion, late and exceptional; but in the storm-god’s case it went far. The clearest monument of that fusion is the open-air rock sanctuary of Yazılıkaya above the capital, where, under Tudḫaliya IV in the thirteenth century before the present era, the imperial pantheon was carved in a Hurrianized order — the gods in procession, the storm-god holding his three-pronged bolt and standing upon the mountains, meeting his goddess at the head of the line. The figure carved there is named in Hurrian terms; the office is the one Tarḫunna had always held. (Teshub traces the identification and the Yazılıkaya relief.)

Chamber A at Yazılıkaya: the storm-god Teššub (left) meeting the goddess Ḫebat at the head of the carved procession of the gods. Photograph by Bernard Gagnon, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

So the storm-god wore, in the empire’s reckoning, a double name. To the Hittite scribe of the treaties he was the storm-god of Hatti, Tarḫunna; to the Hurrianized court of the last great kings he was Teššub on the rock of Yazılıkaya. The careful eye keeps them as what they were — two storm-kings of two traditions, brought under one carved procession in the empire’s last age, neither one collapsed wholly into the other.

The grain-giver of the late kings

When the Hittite empire fell, around 1180 before the present era, in the wider collapse of the Bronze-Age world, the storm-god did not fall with it. He passed into the Iron Age in the keeping of the Luwian-speaking south, where a scatter of small successor kingdoms — the Neo-Hittite or Syro-Hittite states — carried the old gods and the old hieroglyphic-Luwian script forward for centuries. There the storm-god was Tarḫunz, and in the lands of Tabal and Tuwana he took on a particular and gentler character: the storm-god of the vineyard, the turwarasina Tarḫunza, the power who gave not only the rain but the grain and the wine that the rain made possible.

The great monument of that late cult stands carved into living rock near a spring at İvriz, in south-central Anatolia. There, in the second half of the eighth century before the present era, King Warpalawas of Tuwana had himself shown small and reverent, hands raised in worship, before a towering storm-god — and the god holds not the thunderbolt but ears of ripe grain in one hand and heavy clusters of grapes in the other. The relief, the finest of all the Anatolian rock-reliefs, makes the storm-god’s oldest function plain in its mildest form: the lord of the weather is the giver of the harvest, and the king stands before him as the supplicant on whom the land’s plenty depends. The carving bears a hieroglyphic-Luwian inscription and was, by its own text, cut by a servant of the king; a nearby spring underlines the fertility the god commands. (İvriz relief describes the monument and its inscriptions.) Modern work at the site continues to read the place: a Luwian stele recovered from the valley has lately been edited to give the ancient name of the İvriz spring itself, as recent reporting on the İvriz finds describes. The İvriz storm-god has his own entry as the İvriz relief.

Set against the wider Indo-European company, Tarḫunna falls among the storm-and-sky sovereigns who head so many of the related pantheons — the god of the bright sky and the thunderbolt who rules the rest. The parallel to the Greek Zeus, the sky-king with the bolt in his hand, is a genuine one, and the kinship runs deeper than resemblance, for both belong to the same Indo-European inheritance of a sky-father wielding the storm; the Anatolian god, with his bull and his triple bolt and his combat against the serpent, gives one of the oldest documented faces of that figure. The likeness is a comparison drawn across kindred traditions — Tarḫunna remains the storm-king of Anatolia, attested in his own archives and on his own rock.

For the storm-god is, before all else, a figure of the documentary record. He is recovered almost wholly from the cuneiform archives of the Hittite capital — the tens of thousands of clay tablets excavated at Boğazköy, the treaties with their god-lists, the festival texts that carry the Illuyanka combat, the prayers and the ritual instructions — and from the carved rock at Yazılıkaya and İvriz. Much of what can be said of him is said because a Hittite scribe wrote it down and the dry plateau kept the tablet whole. The capital itself, Hattusa, where the archives were found, is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Across two thousand years, from the storm-god of the Ḫattian towns through Tarḫunna of the treaties and Teššub of Yazılıkaya to the grain-giving Tarḫunz of İvriz, one office held: the bull beneath the god, the bolt in his hand, the rain that he sends or withholds, and the king who stands before him as the keeper of a land that lives or dies by the weather.

→ Related: Teshub · Kumarbi · Arinna Sun Goddess · Telipinu · Yazilikaya · Hattusa · Ivriz Relief · Eflatun Pinar · The Hurrians · The Luwians · The Hattians · Hittites · Hittite Empire · Phrygia · Zeus · Baal · Marduk · Anu · Ishtar · Divination