Teshub

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A basalt relief broken from a wall at Carchemish, carved in the tenth century before the common era, shows a bearded figure in a short kilt striding to the right. In one hand he carries an axe; from the other an undulating shaft rises like a tongue of fire. The body is gone below the waist, and the stone has the dull surface of long burial. The figure is the storm-god — and in the speech of the Hurrians, the people who carried this god westward into Anatolia and Syria, his name was Teššub: he who strikes.

Neo-Hittite basalt relief of the storm-god Teshub, from Carchemish, ca. 10th century BCE; British Museum (ME 117909). Photo by Szilas, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The storm upon the mountains

Teššub was the weather-god and the head of the pantheon of the Hurrians, a people whose homeland lay across upper Mesopotamia and the upland of northern Syria and southeastern Anatolia, and whose kings in the second millennium ruled the wide kingdom of Mitanni. The name is read Teššub or Tešub, written in cuneiform with conventions that also yield Teššob and Teššop; the Ugaritic alphabet rendered it tṯb. Its etymology is Hurrian and not securely explained, but the office it names is plain. Thunder, lightning, rain, and the winds were his weapons, and the god who wielded them stood at once as a power of destruction and as a guardian of the human world.

His image is the image of the storm itself made into a body. He is drawn as an armed and bearded man, often with a bundle of lightning in his fist, and in the great relief at the rock sanctuary of Yazılıkaya he holds a three-pronged bolt and stands upon two mountains — the peaks Namni and Ḫazzi, raised under his feet as a pair of mountain-gods bowed to bear his weight. He rides in a chariot drawn by two bulls, and the bulls have names of their own: Šeri and Ḫurri, “Day” and “Night,” yoked beneath the god who crosses the sky. The bull was his creature and his emblem, as it was for every storm-god of the region, so that across the languages of the Near East the same animal stood beneath the same office. His consort was the goddess Ḫebat, who came up out of the local pantheon of Aleppo and rose with him to the height of heaven; their son was Šarruma, who would have his own place in the rock-cut files of Yazılıkaya.

He is among the oldest gods of the region attested by name. Hurrian personal names compounded with Teššub appear already in the Ur III period, around the twenty-first century before the common era, and by the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries his was the divine name most often woven into the names of Hurrian people, parents folding their god into the identity of a child. His worship reached from southeastern Anatolia to the slopes of the Zagros. His chief sanctuary stood at a city called Kumme, whose site is lost but is set by scholars somewhere in the eastern Khabur country; his most celebrated local form was the Teššub of Aleppo, the Halab hypostasis, whose cult was so great that when it was carried into the Hittite capital thirteen festivals were kept there jointly for Teššub of Aleppo and Ḫebat. He had houses at Arrapha near modern Kirkuk, at Kaḫat in the Mitanni heartland, at Kummanni in Kizzuwatna, at Nuzi where he may have shared a temple with the goddess Šauška.

Across the frontier of language he was met by his own likeness. To the scribes of Mesopotamia he was Adad; to the singers of Ugarit, Baal; to the Hittites and Luwians of central Anatolia he answered to Tarhunna and Tarḫunz, the storm-king of Hatti, with whom he shared an office and at last a body of carved stone. It is one of the recurring facts of the Anatolian sacred world that two storm-kings of different tongues stood side by side, the Hittite-Luwian Tarhunna and the Hurrian Teššub, parallel sovereigns of weather and of the gods, distinct in origin and increasingly merged in cult — and it is worth holding them apart even where the later state ran them together, for Teššub is the god of the Hurrians and Tarhunna the god the Hittites inherited at home.

The kingship won and held

What sets Teššub apart among the storm-gods of the Near East is that the Hurrians told, of him, a story of how heaven came to be ruled — a theogony of the generations of the sky, in which the throne passes from hand to hand by violence until it comes to rest with him. The Hittite scribes of Hattusa preserved this Hurrian matter in their own translation, copied onto tablets in the great archive of the capital, and modern scholarship gathers the linked songs under the name of the Kumarbi Cycle, after the elder god who is Teššub’s adversary and, in the strangest turn of the tale, his parent.

The opening song is called the Song of Emergence, or the Song of Kumarbi, or simply Kingship in Heaven; its principal copy is the broken tablet cataloged KUB 33.120, of which perhaps a third survives. It sets out a succession of four kings of the gods. First there was Alalu, who held the throne nine years before his cupbearer Anu rose against him and cast him down. Anu reigned in turn, and after nine years his own cupbearer Kumarbi made war on him. When Anu fled upward toward the sky, Kumarbi seized him by the feet, dragged him down, and bit off and swallowed his manhood — and with that act the contest passed from the open clash of arms into the hidden generation of a new heaven. For the swallowed seed of Anu, the sky-god, took root in Kumarbi’s body. Anu, escaping, laughed at his conqueror and told him what he had done: he had filled Kumarbi with a burden, with three mighty gods — the storm-god, the river Tigris, and the warrior Tašmišu. So Teššub was conceived within the very god he would one day depose, the son made out of the manhood of his grandfather, lodged in the belly of his father; and when the time came, his birth split Kumarbi’s skull to let him out. The tale is a theogony rendered in the harsh idiom of begetting and devouring, and it is best read as the Hurrians read it — as the account of how the kingship of heaven descended through the generations to the god who now holds it.

He had still to take and to keep the throne. The later songs of the cycle turn on Teššub’s rise to the kingship and on Kumarbi’s refusal to accept his loss: the elder god raises one champion after another to unseat the storm-king. There is a sea-monster, Ḫedammu, of insatiable appetite. And there is, in the song that survives best of all, the stone giant Ullikummi.

The Song of Ullikummi tells how Kumarbi begot a son upon a great rock, a being of diorite without eyes to see or ears to hear or heart to be turned aside, and named him Ullikummi — a name read as “Destroy Kumme,” a weapon aimed at Teššub’s own holy city. The infant of stone was set upon the right shoulder of Upelluri, a primordial giant who stands in the dark water at the base of the world bearing earth and heaven upon him, an Atlas before Atlas, so old that he had not felt it when heaven and earth were first cut apart upon him. There Ullikummi grew. He rose through the sea like a tower; he reached the sky; he came up before the gate of Teššub’s city, and the goddesses on the wall could no longer see over him. Teššub went out against him and was beaten, and for a season the storm-king was thrown down from his sovereignty. The remedy came from the oldest wisdom of the gods. Ea — the Mesopotamian Enki, lord of the deep waters and of cunning, whom the Hurrians took into their company — went down to the storehouse of the primeval gods and brought up the ancient copper saw with which heaven and earth had first been parted from one another upon Upelluri’s shoulder. With that tool he cut the stone giant free at the feet, and Ullikummi, severed from the strength of the earth that bore him, was broken; and Teššub went up again to the kingship of heaven. The throne was held, as it had been won, by force and by craft together.

The central panel of Chamber A at Yazılıkaya: the storm-god Teššub on two mountain-gods (left) meets the goddess Ḫebat on her panther (right), at the head of the converging files of the gods. Photo by Klaus-Peter Simon, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0.

The pantheon in the rock

A little over a kilometer from the walls of Hattusa, where the ground breaks into a cluster of standing rocks, two narrow open-air galleries run back into the living stone. This is the sanctuary the Turks call Yazılıkaya, “the inscribed rock,” and along its walls the gods of the Hittite empire walk in carved procession. The great chambers were cut and dressed in the final century of the empire, in the second half of the thirteenth century before the common era, under the kings Tudḫaliya IV and Šuppiluliuma II, though the place had been holy for centuries before — the most extensive open-air monument the Hittites left, and the fullest single statement of their state theology in stone.

What it states, in its last form, is a pantheon recast in Hurrian dress. Along the two walls of the larger gallery, Chamber A, some sixty-four divine figures advance in two files toward the back wall — male gods from the left, goddesses from the right — and at the point where the files converge stands the central scene. There the storm-god Teššub stands upon two bowed mountain-men, and toward him comes Ḫebat upon the back of a panther; behind her stands their son Šarruma upon a smaller cat, and the daughters of the house behind him. The leading gods of the procession are named in the hieroglyphic-Luwian script beside them, and the names are Hurrian: this is the Hurrian pantheon, with Teššub and Ḫebat at its head, raised over the central sanctuary of a Hittite king. By the thirteenth century the queen Puduḫepa, herself the daughter of a Hurrian priest, and her line had drawn the gods of the Hurrians fully into the heart of the state cult, so that the empire’s last great act of carving sets a Hurrian storm-king and his consort at the meeting-point of all the gods of Hatti.

The smaller gallery, Chamber B, is narrower and more guarded in feeling. Along one wall march twelve gods of the underworld in lockstep, sword on shoulder, a running file that the carvers repeated like a single figure multiplied. On another face the great king Tudḫaliya IV stands in the embrace of the god Šarruma, the divine son with his arm about the king’s shoulders, leading him — a relief dated to about 1250 to 1220 before the common era, and most likely a memorial chamber for that king. The sword-god, the deified blade plunged hilt-up into the rock with a god’s torso rising from its pommel, presides over the lower gods. To stand in these galleries is to stand inside the imperial settlement of who ruled in heaven: the Hurrian Teššub at the head of the bright procession of Chamber A, the gods of the dead in the shadowed corridor of Chamber B.

The procession of the twelve gods of the underworld, Chamber B, Yazılıkaya. Photo by Bernard Gagnon, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Afterlives of the storm-king

When the Hittite state fell at the close of the Bronze Age, the carved gods of Yazılıkaya passed under the earth and the songs of Kumarbi lay buried in the broken archive until the spade and the decipherer’s patience brought them up again in the modern age. The tablets of Hattusa — the Boğazköy texts, recovered from the early twentieth century onward — gave back the Hurrian theogony in its Hittite copies, and with it the storm-king’s quarrel with the god who bore him. UNESCO inscribed the capital, with its sanctuary, on the World Heritage List in 1986, under the name Hattusha: the Hittite Capital, and the procession of the gods became a monument of the world.

The storm-god himself did not vanish with the empire that carved him. In the Iron-Age states of eastern Anatolia his Urartian counterpart Teišeba took a high place among the gods of the kingdom of Urartu, the second of a ruling triad; and across the Neo-Hittite principalities of Syria and the southeast — among them Carchemish, from whose wall the basalt relief at the head of this entry was broken — the storm-god in his various local forms went on receiving offerings and standing carved upon the bull, a continuity of the Anatolian weather-god from the Bronze Age into the first millennium that runs parallel to the survival of Tarhunna, Tarḫunz, in the Luwian south.

The fullest afterlife of Teššub, though, lies not in his cult but in a resemblance noticed by scholars. The succession at the opening of the Kumarbi Cycle — Alalu, then Anu, then Kumarbi who castrates Anu and is in turn displaced by the storm-god he unwillingly fathered — runs strikingly close to the succession of the generations of the gods in the Greek poet Hesiod’s Theogony, where Ouranos the sky is unmanned by his son Kronos, and Kronos in turn is overthrown by Zeus, the storm-wielding king of the Olympians. The pattern of three or four generations of heaven’s kings, the castration of the sky-father, the final storm-god who takes and keeps the throne: these are held by a broad scholarly consensus to mark the Hurrian myth as an eastern forerunner of the Greek, transmitted somewhere across the cultural bridge of the Bronze- and Iron-Age Levant. The route of that transmission is debated and not settled in detail; what is not in dispute is that the story of how heaven changed its rulers reached the Aegean from the Anatolian east. It is, as such recognitions go, a scholarly finding and not a claim the Hurrians themselves ever made — they did not know they were composing a forerunner. They knew only that the storm broke the elder gods and held the sky, and that the name of the god who held it was Teššub.

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