Inara

The storerooms of a Hittite town were built against famine, not for parties: rows of clay jars sunk to their shoulders in the earth, each one big enough to hide a man. Inara filled them. Wine in one, marnuwan in the next, walhi beer after that, and the tablet says she made an abundance in the vessels, which is a scribe’s way of saying she overdid it on purpose. The smell of it would have sat in the cool of that room all afternoon. The text is exact about the drink and silent about almost everything else, and that tells you which of the two the story cares about.

She was cooking a trap, and she was cooking it because her father had lost. The Storm God had gone up against the serpent at Kiskilussa and the serpent had beaten him. The Hittite scribe does not dress this up or explain it away; the god of the sky was thrown down by a snake, and that is where the myth starts. So the Storm God called the other gods together with a line that is half invitation and half confession: come in, Inara has prepared a feast. Not one of them offers to fight.

Her name is old, older than the Hittites themselves. Inar, in the earliest spellings, belongs to the Hattic people who were living in central Anatolia before the Hittites arrived and whose gods the Hittites took over wholesale. Scribes commonly wrote her with the logogram LAMMA, the sign used for a protective deity, which makes her one of a whole class of tutelary powers whose job was to guard a place, a king, a road, a herd. What she guards is everything outside the walls: the steppe, the game on it, the country a man crosses at his own risk. The cult images of these deities were not statues but hunting bags of stitched hide, carried in procession at the great festivals and hung up in their shrines. A goddess represented by a game bag is a goddess whose business is out in the grass.

She went to a town called Ziggaratta and found a man there. His name was Hupasiya and he was mortal, and the exchange between them takes four lines and gives away the whole shape of the myth. She said she had a thing to do and told him to join with her. He said that if he could sleep with her, then he would come and do what her heart desired. And he slept with her. A goddess who could have picked any hero in Anatolia paid a stranger in advance, and she paid him with herself, and neither of them seems to think this is remarkable.

Then she hid him, put on her jewellery, and stood at the mouth of the pit and called the serpent up to eat and drink. It came, and it brought its children. They emptied every jar and were sated. And then, swollen, they could not get back down into the hole. That is the whole battle. There is no duel, no thrown weapon, no wound. There is only an animal too full to fit back into its own burrow, and a man coming quietly out of hiding with a rope, and the coarse fibre biting into the coils as he ties it up, and the Storm God arriving to kill a bound thing. The other gods stood at his side, which was easy for them by then.

Nobody wrote down what she looked like. The tablets keep their eyes on her hands: the pouring, the hiding, the adorning, the rope she did not tie herself. If she had a face in Hittite art it has not been securely attached to her name, and the honest position is that she is a voice, a plan and a house, and no body at all.

The house is the ugly part. She built one on a rock at Tarukka, installed Hupasiya inside it, and gave him one rule: when I go out into the country, do not look out of the window. If you look, you will see your wife and your children. He lasted twenty days. Then he looked, and he saw them, and when Inara came back from the fields he was whining to be let go home. Here the tablet breaks. In one restoration she kills him where he stands; a recent reading takes the damaged verb as a divorce, the goddess dismissing her husband for disobedience the way a Hittite man would dismiss a wife. Either way the man who won the war is finished at that window, and the pattern is one the Hittites understood perfectly well: the mortals who get close enough to a god to be useful do not survive the intimacy.

What she does next is the reason the story was kept at all. She goes to Kiskilussa and puts her house, and the waters of the deep, into the hand of the king. The tablet in which all this is written is not a storybook. It is the script of the purulli, the festival performed for the land in spring, and the priest who dictated it, a man called Kella from the storm god’s temple at Nerik, opens by telling us exactly what is said over the fields: let the land grow and thrive, let the land be protected. The dragon fight was liturgy. Once a year a kingdom that lived and died by rain and barley recited the time its sky god was beaten and a goddess got the monster drunk.

The same tablet carries a second version, and she is not in it. In that one the serpent takes the Storm God’s heart and eyes; the god fathers a son on a poor man’s daughter; the son marries the serpent’s daughter and asks for the heart and eyes as a bride gift, and gets them, and carries them home. Restored, the Storm God goes back to the sea to fight, and his own son, standing among his wife’s people, shouts up to heaven: include me, do not show me any mercy. He kills them both. Two stories, one lesson, and in both of them the god cannot finish the job without a human who ends up dead.

Her powers are not the powers of a war goddess and were never meant to be. She can call a thing up out of the ground by offering it what it wants. She has the wild country and the animals in it, and the underground water, and she can hand that water to a king and make his cult legitimate for as long as Hatti stands. Her weakness is written into the myth she wins: she cannot tie the knot. The rope needs a mortal hand, and the killing needs her father, and the price of both comes out of somebody else. There is a slower defeat too. In the oldest copies of the great KI.LAM festival, Inar receives her offerings under her own name, beside the goddess Hapantali. In the later copies the scribes have quietly written LAMMA instead, the title in place of the person. She won the fight and then disappeared into a logogram.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Inara in Hittite mythology?

Inara is a Hittite protective goddess of Hattic origin, the daughter of the Storm God, associated with the wild country and its animals. Her name is frequently written with the Sumerian sign LAMMA, the sign for a tutelary deity, which places her among the powers whose job was to guard places, kings and herds. She is best known from the myth of the serpent Illuyanka, where she destroys the monster that had defeated her father.

How did Inara defeat the dragon Illuyanka?

She threw a feast. After Illuyanka beat the Storm God in battle at Kiskilussa, Inara filled storage vessels with wine, marnuwan and walhi beer, invited the serpent and its children up out of their hole, and let them drink until they were too swollen to get back down. Her mortal helper Hupasiya then tied the serpent up with a rope, and the Storm God came and killed it.

Who was Hupasiya and what happened to him?

Hupasiya was a mortal man from the town of Ziggaratta whom Inara recruited to help her, and whose price was that she sleep with him. After the serpent was killed she housed him on a rock at Tarukka and forbade him to look out of the window. He looked, saw his wife and children, and begged to go home; the tablet is damaged at this point, and Inara either kills him or divorces him.

What is the purulli festival, and what does Inara have to do with it?

The purulli was a Hittite festival performed in spring for the growth and protection of the land, and the Illuyanka myth is the text recited at it. The story ends with Inara placing her house and the waters of the deep into the hand of the king at Kiskilussa, which is the myth’s explanation of why the king holds that cult. The tablet was dictated by Kella, an anointed priest of the Storm God of Nerik.

Is Inara a goddess of the hunt?

Not exactly. Inara is a tutelary or protective deity associated with the wild animals of the steppe, which is not the same thing as a goddess who hunts them, and the surviving myth shows her trapping and feasting rather than hunting. The comparison with Artemis and other mistress-of-animals figures is a modern scholarly one, useful as a signpost but not something the Hittite texts say.

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Illuyanka, Teshub, Kumarbi, Hedammu, Ullikummi, Hepat, Šarruma, Allatu, Tiamat, Marduk, Lotan, Typhon, Zeus, Yamata no Orochi, Susanoo