Hannahanna

Also Known As: Ḫannaḫanna; also Hannahannas; from Hittite ḫanna-, “grandmother”
Region/Culture: Mesopotamia and Ancient Near East
Mythos: Hittite/Hurrian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: She is the old mother goddess of the Hittites, the one the other gods go to when something has gone wrong and nobody else knows what to do.
Role in Mythos: In the myths of vanishing gods she is the counsellor who keeps the search going, and in one fragmentary tale she is the deity who vanishes.
Relation to Humans: When her temper turns, motherhood itself fails, so that cattle, sheep and human mothers all stop caring for their young. Her anger was dealt with in ritual, sent down into the Dark Earth, so that she would come back and the bond between mother and child would return.

When the god Telipinu walked out of the world in a rage, the cold came in behind him. Mist pressed against the windows. Smoke hung in the houses. The logs on the hearths would not burn, the gods on their altars were choked, and in the folds the sheep and cows turned away from their own young. The grain stopped growing. Gods and people alike began to starve. The great gods went looking for him and found nothing, and in the end the storm god Tarhunna, Telipinu’s father, did what everyone in Hittite myth seems to do when the world is coming apart. He went to see his grandmother.

Her name is Hannahanna, and it means exactly that. It is built on the Hittite word hanna-, grandmother, doubled for weight. She is the senior mother goddess of the Hittite kingdom of central Anatolia, and the clay tablets from its capital, Hattusa, written in the second millennium BC, show her again and again in the same position: not at the centre of the trouble, but the one who knows how to begin fixing it.

The story of Telipinu is the best preserved of the Hittite myths about a god who disappears, and it survives in several copies, the oldest written in Middle Hittite. In it Hannahanna first sends the storm god out to look for his son himself. He searches and comes back with nothing. So she proposes to send a bee. The storm god scoffs. The bee is tiny, its wings are tiny, what could it possibly find that the gods could not? She sends it anyway, with orders: when it finds Telipinu, it is to sting him on the hands and feet to get him up, and to wipe his eyes and feet with its wax to purify him, and then bring him home.

The bee goes, and where the gods failed it finds the god asleep in a meadow. It does as it was told. The sting brings him awake, and the waking makes everything worse. Telipinu is furious at being woken, and his anger now runs loose across the land. It takes further rites, led by the goddess of magic Kamrusepa, to draw that anger out of him and send it down to the underworld, where it can be shut away. Then he comes home, the hearths catch, the herds take back their young, and the grain stands up in the fields. The small creature Hannahanna chose was the only searcher in the whole story that actually succeeded.

That is her pattern. In another tale, about Telipinu and the daughter of the Sea-god, it is Hannahanna who tells the storm god how to settle matters: pay the bride price to the Sea-god, and let the marriage stand. In a fragmentary myth about the disappearance of the goddess Inara, the storm god’s bee brings word that Inara is missing, and Hannahanna sets out to look for her with her own female attendant. The gods of Hattusa had warriors, a sun goddess and a storm god with a mace. When something had to be found, they turned to the old woman and her bee.

Once, though, she was the one who left. The text is broken and much of it is lost, but enough survives to show the shape of it. Hannahanna grows angry and goes away. While she is gone the cattle and sheep are smothered, and mothers, both animal and human, stop paying attention to their children. The thing she governs is not rain or grain but the instinct of a mother to tend what she has borne, and when the goddess withdraws, that instinct simply stops. As in the Telipinu story, the remedy is to get rid of the anger itself. It is banished to the Dark Earth, the Hittite underworld. In one part of the rite brushwood is burned and its vapour is allowed to enter the goddess, carrying the anger out of her. Then she comes back glad, and mothers take up their young again. The smell of that smoke would have hung in the air of the rite, sharp and green.

Her name raises a harder question. Hittite scribes often wrote the names of gods with Sumerian word-signs rather than spelling them out, and the sign group DINGIR.MAḪ, meaning roughly the exalted deity, the mother goddess, is read as Hannahanna in at least some texts. Whether it always means her is another matter. Gary Beckman, in his study of Hittite birth rituals, singled out the mother goddesses written this way as a particularly stubborn problem, because the same signs sometimes stand for a group of birth goddesses rather than one figure. The tablets do not settle it. The older stories, at least, are clear about who they mean.

No myth gives her a face, a weapon or a temple scene. She is defined by what she does and by what fails when she stops doing it. Her power is the power of the senior relative: she is consulted, she gives orders that are obeyed, and she knows that the answer to a lost god may be a bee rather than a battle. Her limits are those of her own office. She cannot make Telipinu come home by sending his father, and the bee she sends wakes a fury she did not foresee. When she herself is angry, she is not exempt from the rule that governs every vanishing god in these texts. The anger has to be taken out of her by ritual and buried, and only then can she return.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Hannahanna?

Hannahanna is the mother goddess of Hittite mythology, worshipped in the Hittite kingdom of central Anatolia in the second millennium BC. Her name comes from the Hittite word hanna-, meaning grandmother. In the myths she is the goddess the other gods consult when a crisis needs solving.

What does Hannahanna do in the myth of Telipinu?

In the myth of Telipinu, Hannahanna advises the storm god when his son Telipinu disappears and the world stops growing. After the storm god’s own search fails, she sends a bee, which finds Telipinu asleep in a meadow and stings him awake. The goddess Kamrusepa then removes Telipinu’s anger with ritual so that he can return.

Why did Hannahanna send a bee?

Hannahanna sent a bee because the gods’ own searches for the missing god Telipinu had failed. The storm god mocked the idea because the bee was so small, but she told it to sting Telipinu’s hands and feet and wipe his eyes and feet with wax. The bee was the only searcher in the story that found him.

What happened when Hannahanna disappeared?

When Hannahanna disappeared in anger, according to a fragmentary Hittite myth, cattle and sheep were smothered and mothers, both animal and human, stopped caring for their young. Her anger was banished to the Dark Earth, the Hittite underworld, partly through a rite in which burning brushwood released vapour into her. She then returned happily and mothers cared for their children again.

Is Hannahanna the same as DINGIR.MAH?

Hannahanna is the reading given to the Sumerian sign group DINGIR.MAḪ, meaning the mother goddess, in at least some Hittite texts. The identification is not certain everywhere, because the same signs can also refer to a group of birth goddesses. The scholar Gary Beckman described these mother goddesses as a particularly difficult problem in Hittite studies.