Kumarbi

Anu made it as far as the open sky before the hands closed on his ankles. He had ruled heaven for nine years and had begun to believe the throne belonged to him. Kumarbi, once his cupbearer, hauled him back down, bit through his groin, and swallowed what he tore loose. He laughed while he did it. Then the seed he had taken settled inside him and began to grow, and Kumarbi understood that he was now pregnant with his enemy’s children, and the laughing stopped.

That single act sits at the center of everything the Hurrians told about their chief god. Kumarbi was the head of their pantheon, a father of the gods in the way that Enlil was in Mesopotamia and El was at Ugarit, and the scribes of the ancient Near East treated the three as versions of one idea. His oldest home was the city of Urkesh in the northern hills, where he was honored long before his stories were written down. Almost everything that survives of those stories comes from clay tablets dug out of Hattusa, the Hittite capital, copied in Hittite by scribes who had inherited the Hurrians’ gods along with their myths. The names are Hurrian. The theology is Hurrian. The language on the tablet is usually someone else’s.

Before he was a usurper he was a farmer’s god. Hittite offering lists set him among the deities who received grain, and on the carved rock walls of the sanctuary at Yazılıkaya, where the Hurrian pantheon marches in stone procession, Kumarbi is shown bearded and holding the sign for an ear of barley. That is close to the only portrait of him that exists. The myths care almost nothing for how he looked. They are interested in what he wanted, which was the throne of heaven, and in how far he would go to take it and then to take it back.

The succession that put him there ran through four generations. First Alalu was king in heaven, and Anu, god of the sky, bowed at his feet and served as his cupbearer. After nine years Anu struck, Alalu fled down into the dark earth, and the sky-god took the throne. Then it was Kumarbi’s turn to pour the wine, and to wait, and after nine more years to attack. What he swallowed in that fight did not stay swallowed. Teshub, the storm-god, was inside him now, along with the river Tigris and the god Tašmišu, and there was no clean way for them to come out. The tablets break at the crucial moments, so the exact route the storm-god took into the world is lost, but the outcome is not. Teshub was born, Teshub grew, and Teshub set out to do to Kumarbi exactly what Kumarbi had done to Anu.

There is a smaller, stranger scene folded into the same cycle. Warned that the storm-god was coming, Kumarbi was handed a stone and told it was the child he meant to destroy. He put it in his mouth to crush it and broke his teeth instead. The stone was afterward set up and honored, a lump of rock that had once been mistaken for a god. It is the kind of detail that gives the whole tradition its flavor, grand and violent and then suddenly, plainly absurd.

The rest of Kumarbi’s story is a record of losing. Deposed by his son, he refused to accept it and went looking for a champion who could break the storm-god for him. He lay with a great cliff of rock and fathered Ullikummi, a child of diorite, blind and deaf and with no mind to reason with, and he set him on the right shoulder of Upelluri, the giant who stands in the sea holding up the weight of heaven and earth and who barely noticed the new burden. Ullikummi grew straight out of the water, a pillar of stone climbing toward the gate of Teshub’s city, until the gods could see him from their windows and began to be afraid. What finished him was not strength. It was Ea, the wise god, who went down to Upelluri, found the ancient copper blade that had once cut heaven away from earth at the beginning of things, and used it to saw the stone giant free at the base. Cut loose from the shoulder that fed him, Ullikummi could be beaten. Another time Kumarbi fathered Ḫedammu, a sea-dragon whose appetite emptied the world, and that campaign ended when the goddess Šauška undressed on the shore and charmed the monster into a stupor.

His powers were the powers of a first father. He could bring forth gods from his own body and monsters from stone and seawater, engineering one champion after another against the son who had unseated him. He carried the older, gentler memory of grain and harvest, an office he never fully shed. He was patient in the way only something very old can be patient. His weakness was the flat fact underneath all of it. He never won. The throne he seized was carried inside him and then walked out on its own legs to depose him, and every creature he built to reclaim it was outmatched, tricked, or sawn apart. He broke his teeth on a stone he thought was his enemy. The father of the gods spent his myth reaching for a chair his own children would not let him keep.

The parallel was obvious almost as soon as the tablets were read. A sky-father unmanned by his son, that son swallowing or swallowed, a storm-god rising at the end to rule, a last challenger of stone or serpent hurled against him. The Greeks told it as Uranus, Cronus, and Zeus. The Hurrians told it earlier, and their version traveled west through the ports and palaces of the Bronze Age until something very close to it surfaced in Hesiod. Kumarbi lost his war in heaven. His story won a much longer one.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Kumarbi?

Kumarbi is the chief god of the Hurrians, an ancient people of northern Mesopotamia and Syria, and a “father of the gods” comparable to Enlil in Mesopotamia and El at Ugarit. He is best known as the deposed king of heaven in the Kumarbi Cycle, a group of myths preserved on Hittite tablets from Hattusa. He also functioned as a god of grain.

What did Kumarbi do to Anu?

Kumarbi overthrew the sky-god Anu after serving nine years as his cupbearer, bit off Anu’s genitals during the fight, and swallowed them. In doing so he became pregnant with the gods conceived from Anu’s seed, including the storm-god Teshub, the god Tašmišu, and the river Tigris. This act of usurpation and unwilling pregnancy is the central event of the Kingship in Heaven myth.

Who was Kumarbi’s greatest enemy?

Kumarbi’s greatest enemy was his own son Teshub, the storm-god, who overthrew him to take the kingship of heaven. Kumarbi spent the rest of the cycle trying to depose Teshub, fathering monsters such as the stone giant Ullikummi and the sea-dragon Ḫedammu to destroy him, but each attempt failed.

Why is Kumarbi compared to the Greek god Cronus?

Kumarbi is compared to Cronus because both are sky-generation gods who unman and depose a divine father, only to be overthrown in turn by a storm-god son (Teshub for Kumarbi, Zeus for Cronus). Scholars recognized the resemblance to the Greek succession of Uranus, Cronus, and Zeus soon after the Hurrian tablets were deciphered, and many think the Hurrian myth influenced the later Greek version through Bronze Age contact.

What is the Song of Ullikummi?

The Song of Ullikummi is a myth in the Kumarbi Cycle in which Kumarbi fathers a giant made of diorite stone on a great rock, then sets him on the shoulder of the sea-giant Upelluri to grow and topple Teshub. Ullikummi is defeated when the wise god Ea saws the giant free from Upelluri’s shoulder using the ancient blade that once separated heaven from earth.

Related Entries

Teshub, Anu, Ullikummi, Hedammu, Hepat, Enki, Ishtar, Enlil, Dagon, El, Cronus, Uranus, Zeus, Tiamat