Alalu

Before there was a storm god, before the sky god had a throne of his own, there was a king sitting in heaven with a cup in his hand. The cup was filled by Anu, the mightiest of the gods, who stood in front of the throne and bowed down at his master’s feet. The king was Alalu, and the Hittite poem that remembers him opens with exactly that picture: “Long ago, in former years, Alalu was king in heaven.”

The poem is known today as the Song of Going Forth, or the Song of Emergence, and older books call it the Kingship in Heaven. It was written down in Hittite on clay tablets at Hattusa in central Anatolia, but its gods are mostly Hurrian and its opening pair are older still. It is the first movement of the Kumarbi Cycle, a run of songs about who would rule the gods and how badly each ruler would be treated by the next. Alalu is where the whole bloody sequence begins, and he is also the first to lose.

The service went on for nine years. Every day the sky god knelt, every day the cup was set into the king’s hand, and the clink of it against the throne was the only sound of the reign that anyone bothered to record. In the ninth year Anu stopped kneeling. He went into battle against Alalu, and the king who had been served on bended knee could not hold his throne against the servant who had served him. Alalu ran. He fled before Anu and went down into the Dark Earth, the cold underground country that Hittite texts reserve for the dead and the defeated gods.

He does not come back. Once he has gone below, Alalu plays no further part in the story, and the song turns to its next turn of the wheel. Anu reigns for nine years in his turn, with Kumarbi as his cupbearer, and Kumarbi does to Anu what Anu did to Alalu, except that he bites off Anu’s genitals as the sky god flees. Out of that mouthful come the storm god Teshub and his brothers, and out of Teshub’s eventual victory comes the order of the world the Hittites actually worshipped. Gurney, summarising the myth for Britannica, puts the rhythm plainly: Alalu held the kingship for nine years, was defeated by Anu, and went down to the netherworld.

Where Alalu himself came from is never explained. The poem gives no parents, no birth and no reason for his kingship beyond the fact that it was the first. What it does give is a family line. Kumarbi is called “the seed of Alalu,” and in the Song of Hedammu he names himself “Kumarbi, son of Alalu.” That makes the story stranger than it first looks. Anu and Alalu appear to be two separate houses, not father and son. Gary Beckman observed that the two lines seem to join only in the next generation, when Kumarbi swallows Anu’s seed and becomes pregnant with Teshub, so that the storm god carries both bloodlines at once. Christian Zgoll, writing in the Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions in 2021, argues instead that one disputed line should be read as making Anu, not Kumarbi, Alalu’s offspring, which would turn the prologue into a single dynasty eating itself. The tablets are broken in the right places for both readings to survive.

The name was not invented in Anatolia. Alala appears in Mesopotamian god lists as one of the ancestors of Anu, usually the last pair before him, Alala paired with Belili, two names chosen, it seems, mostly because both repeat a syllable. W. G. Lambert, in Babylonian Creation Myths (2013), treated the Mesopotamian Alala as the oldest form of the god and the Hurrian Alalu as a borrowing from it, and suggested that behind the Hurrian overthrow lies a Mesopotamian myth of a quarrel between Alala and Anu that has never been found. The Mesopotamian evidence is thin. Alala turns up in an Assyrian incantation about ergot, “coming down to the land,” and a line in the Maqlu incantations speaks of a time before the god Ningirsu “gave utterance to Alala in the land.” Lambert wondered whether the name was a deified work cry, the kind of rhythmic shout a crew raises as it hauls or threshes, in the same way that fire was deified as a god. Volkert Haas took him instead for a personification of storm surge. Nobody has settled it.

In the Hittite world Alalu belonged to a class of beings the texts call the former gods or primeval gods, divinities who had ruled once and now lived under the earth. They were not forgotten. Alalu could be listed among the divine witnesses of international treaties, including the agreement between the Hittite king Muwatalli II and Alaksandu of Wilusa. There is a quiet logic to that. A god who knows exactly what it feels like to be thrown out of office makes a good witness to a promise of loyalty.

Further down the Euphrates, at the city of Emar in what is now Syria, the god had a working life of his own under the shorter name Alal. Texts written in Akkadian there mention his priest and his temple, which Daniel Fleming argued he shared with a deity called Amaza, probably the same figure the Hurrians knew as Amizzadu. The two nearly always appear together. They received honey, oil, ghee, doves, beef, venison, lambs and fruit, and during the festival of the god Dagan two offering tables were set out for them as “the gods below.” At Emar’s great zukru festival Alal stood eighth in the offering lists and received five calves and ten lambs, a first-rank portion. It is the only place where the exile of the poem seems to have eaten well.

Whatever power Alalu had came from being first. He held the throne of heaven before anyone else held it, and the whole later order of the gods, Anu’s sky, Kumarbi’s revenge, Teshub’s storm, is measured from his reign. In exile that priority became a different kind of authority, the gravity of the oldest generation, which is why kings wanted him watching when they swore.

His weakness is written into the same first scene. He ruled by being served, and the one who served him was stronger than he was. Alalu never fights back, never schemes and never returns; his only recorded act after losing is to run. The Greek succession myth in Hesiod’s Theogony follows the Hurrian pattern closely enough that the two are routinely compared, but it has no Alalu at all, no king before the sky. Philo of Byblos, writing of Phoenician lore, did describe a first ruler called Elioun who came before the sky, and Marvin Pope noted the resemblance in 1955. Elioun, Philo says, was killed by wild beasts while out hunting. Alalu got the Dark Earth instead, and a cup he no longer had anyone to fill.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Alalu in Hittite mythology?

Alalu is the first king of the gods in the Hurro-Hittite Song of Going Forth, also called the Kingship in Heaven. He ruled heaven for nine years with the sky god Anu as his cupbearer, until Anu attacked him in the ninth year. Alalu then fled into the Dark Earth, the underworld.

How is Alalu related to Kumarbi?

The Song of Going Forth calls Kumarbi “the seed of Alalu,” and in the Song of Hedammu Kumarbi calls himself “son of Alalu.” Most translations follow that reading, which makes Alalu and Anu the heads of two separate lines. Christian Zgoll has argued that one disputed line instead makes Anu, not Kumarbi, Alalu’s offspring.

Is Alalu a Mesopotamian god?

Alalu’s name comes from Mesopotamia, where Alala appears in god lists as an ancestor of Anu, paired with Belili. W. G. Lambert considered the Mesopotamian Alala the oldest form and the Hurrian Alalu a borrowing. The story of his overthrow survives only in the Hittite texts.

Where was Alalu worshipped?

At Emar on the Middle Euphrates, Alalu was worshipped as Alal and had a temple and a priest. He usually shared offerings with a companion deity called Amaza, and the two were treated as underworld gods, “the gods below.” Alal received a first-rank portion at Emar’s zukru festival.

Is there a Greek equivalent of Alalu?

No. Hesiod’s Theogony closely parallels the Hurrian succession of divine kings, but it has no ruler before the sky god. The nearest comparison is Philo of Byblos’s Elioun, a first ruler of the gods before the sky, whom Philo says was killed by wild beasts while hunting.

Related Entries

Kumarbi, Anu (Mesopotamian), Teshub, Ullikummi, Hedammu, Tarhunna, Hepat, Allatu, Ereshkigal, Uranus, Cronus, El