Tarhunna

Also Known As: Hittite Tarhunna, from the verb tarh-, to overcome or prevail; Luwian Tarhunt or Tarhunz; the Hattian storm god he replaced is Taru and the Hurrian one he was merged with is Teshub
Region/Culture: Mesopotamia and Ancient Near East
Mythos: Hittite/Hurrian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: His name is a verb meaning to prevail, and the Hittite state treated the weather over Anatolia as its own foreign policy conducted by other means.
Role in Mythos: He is the storm god at the head of the Hittite pantheon, the divine owner of the land, and the god on whose behalf the king rules rather than in his own right.
Relation to Humans: Nobody negotiates with him personally; the king does it, in writing, on behalf of everybody. Hittite prayers to him are formal state documents that list what has gone wrong, admit fault, and ask him to stop.

The Hittite king does not own Anatolia. He says so himself, repeatedly, in documents meant to be read out loud: the land belongs to the storm god, and the king is the man left in charge of it. The formula is not modesty. It is a constitutional arrangement, and it means that when the weather fails, the crops fail, the plague comes and the enemy crosses the border, the correct response is not military but administrative. Somebody has to find out what the god is annoyed about.

His name is a boast that never had to be explained to anyone who spoke the language. Tarh- is an ordinary Hittite verb meaning to overcome, to prevail, to be able to do a thing. Tarhunna is that verb wearing a divine name, and the same root produces the Luwian form Tarhunt, and the Luwian storm god turns up centuries later in Iron Age inscriptions as Tarhunz still doing the same job.

He is also, awkwardly for anyone who wants a clean pedigree, at least three gods.

The Hittites arrived in an Anatolia that already had a storm god. The Hattians, the older population whose gods and priestly language the Hittites took over wholesale, called him Taru, and much of the ritual and most of the oldest myths come from them. Then the empire expanded east and south into Hurrian territory and acquired Teshub, the Hurrian storm god, whose iconography and whose whole family came with him, and by the imperial period the two were being written with the same sign and treated as one. What the tablets actually record is a single office held by several gods at once, filed under a name that the scribes could write as a logogram and pronounce however the local congregation preferred. There is no single Anatolian storm god. There is a position, and it was always filled.

The position came with a wife. The Sun Goddess of Arinna was the other half of the Hittite state cult, called queen of all lands, and she and the storm god together stand behind the throne in the royal prayers. She, in her turn, was merged with the Hurrian Hepat exactly as her husband was merged with Teshub. At the rock sanctuary of Yazilikaya outside the capital, where the whole pantheon is carved in procession along the walls of a natural gorge, the two of them meet in the middle, and the gods walking toward them are labelled in Hurrian.

The god’s own bulls came from that eastern side of the marriage: two of them, named and drawing his chariot, and important enough to receive offerings on their own account rather than as livestock.

The myth that puts him in the most trouble is the one recited at the purulli festival, the ceremony performed so that the land would thrive and prosper. A priest of the storm god of Nerik opens it by saying what the story is, and the story begins with the god losing. He fights the serpent Illuyanka at a place called Kiskilussa and is beaten. He calls the other gods for help and, in a detail scholars have found striking, only one of them answers: Inara, the goddess of the wild animals and of the capital. Her plan involves a feast, a great deal of drink, a mortal man named Hupasiya whose price for helping is a night with her, and a rope. The god arrives at the end, with everybody else, and finishes what a woman and a farmhand had already arranged.

That is the most important thing to understand about him. He is the head of the pantheon, he is the owner of the country, and in his own festival myth he is rescued.

His powers are the ones the sky has. Rain and its absence, thunder, the lightning he carries as a three-pronged fork in the reliefs, and by extension the harvest, which in a dry-farming country is the same subject. Behind those sits the political power, which is larger: the treaties the Hittites signed with their neighbours were sworn before him, and breaking one was not a diplomatic matter but an offence against the god who had witnessed it, and the Hittites argued exactly that in writing when they wanted a war.

His weaknesses are the ones that come with holding an office rather than being a person. He can be defeated, and the central festival of the year is built around the year he was. He does not act alone in any surviving narrative and is generally the last god to arrive. His name is so completely a job description that the scribes could write it with a sign and let three different congregations read three different gods out of it, and the modern result is that nobody can be entirely certain, in a given tablet, which storm god is being addressed. He is the most powerful figure in Hittite religion and the hardest one to point at.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Tarhunna?

Tarhunna is the Hittite storm god and the head of the Hittite pantheon, whose name comes from the verb tarh-, to overcome or prevail. He was regarded as the true owner of the Hittite lands, with the king ruling on his behalf, and he was worshipped alongside the Sun Goddess of Arinna as the state’s chief deity.

What is the difference between Tarhunna, Tarhunt, Teshub and Taru?

Tarhunna is the Hittite form of the name and Tarhunt or Tarhunz the Luwian. Taru was the storm god of the older Hattian population whose cult the Hittites inherited, and Teshub was the Hurrian storm god absorbed as the empire expanded eastwards. By the imperial period the Hittites were treating them as one office held under several names.

What does Tarhunna look like?

Anatolian monuments show him bearded and striding forward in a short kilt and a horned conical cap, with an axe or mace raised in one hand and a three-pronged lightning fork in the other. A bull often stands beside him or beneath his feet, and his chariot is drawn by two named divine bulls who received offerings of their own.

Did Tarhunna fight a dragon?

Yes, and he lost the first round. In the myth recited at the purulli festival he fights the serpent Illuyanka at Kiskilussa and is beaten. The goddess Inara arranges the serpent’s downfall with a feast and the help of a mortal named Hupasiya, and the storm god arrives with the other gods to kill it once it is tied up.

Why did the Hittite king say the land belonged to the storm god?

Because Hittite kingship was framed as stewardship rather than ownership. The king administered the country on the god’s behalf, which meant that drought, plague and defeat were read as evidence that something had offended him. Royal prayers survive that work through the possible causes in detail and ask him to relent.