Šarruma

Cut into the limestone of a narrow gorge outside the Hittite capital, a god throws his arm across the shoulders of a king. His hand closes around the mortal’s wrist and draws the smaller figure against his side, and the stone has held that gesture for more than three thousand years. The god stands nearly twice the man’s height. He wears a tall conical cap ringed with horns and a short belted kilt, and his face, worn smooth by weather, still turns toward the one he is protecting. This is Šarruma, and the king pressed to his flank is Tudhaliya the Fourth, who called this god his own.

Šarruma was not born Hittite. He came out of the Hurrian country to the southeast, from the kingdom of Kizzuwatna in the plains beneath the Taurus mountains, where his oldest cult cities were Kummanni and Lawazantiya. Hurrian herders and priests knew him first, and only later did the Hittite court in the north take him up. His name was set down with the old Mesopotamian sign for “king,” so that on the clay he looked like royalty itself, yet what the word meant in his own tongue no one has managed to prove. The etymology is lost.

Whatever the syllables once meant, the peoples who inherited him understood him as a lord of high places. On a rock relief at Hanyeri his name is written with the signs for mountain and king set together, king of the mountains, and an early prayer of Queen Puduhepa already seems to reach for him as a god of the peaks. That association may be the oldest thing about him, older than the temples and the treaties, a memory of some sacred summit whose name has slipped away.

He was reckoned the son of the storm god Teshub and the great goddess Hebat, and in the long offering lists his name falls just after his mother’s, the two of them received together as a pair. Two sisters shared the family, Allanzu and Kunzišalli, sometimes named after him in the rolls of the gods. The Hurrian scribes could call him the calf of Teshub, a small tender word that fits the bull he sometimes became. The bond of father and son may have been stitched together fairly late; one reconstruction puts it no earlier than the fifteenth century, born in Kizzuwatna and grafted onto an older figure. Before that, a few have guessed, he may have stood beside Hebat as her partner rather than her child, though the tablets give no solid support for it and most now let the connection rest at parent and offspring.

His shape shifts across the centuries. The earliest images may show him as a bull outright, and on the Hanyeri relief he is the animal itself, horned and heavy against the rock. Later he becomes a man who rides a beast. At Yazılıkaya he stands on the spotted back of a leopard, slotted into the great procession of the gods behind his mother and ahead of his two sisters, the cat’s pelt cut in shallow relief beneath his upturned shoes. One text arms him with a golden lance. The leopard he shares with Hebat, and the whole picture, cap and kilt and curving footwear, is the standard dress of a Hittite god, worn by a deity who came from somewhere else.

For a figure carved so prominently into the imperial stone, he left almost no stories. He surfaces in exactly one myth, and it casts him oddly: a Hurrian text recovered from Ugarit names him the messenger of Kumarbi, the deposed elder god who spent his fury scheming against the storm god. That sets Teshub’s own son inside the household of Teshub’s great enemy. No one has explained it.

What Šarruma had in place of myth was kings. A prince named Urhi-Teshub, while still the designated heir, sealed his documents with the god standing at his shoulder. The ruler remembered as Tudhaliya the Third had once borne the name Tašmi-Šarruma. And Puduhepa, the formidable queen of Hattusili the Third, dreamed one night that the god came to her and demanded she raise a dozen sanctuaries in his honour, a request she recorded and evidently took seriously. Her son Tudhaliya the Fourth went further and took Šarruma as his personal protector, and when the sculptors dressed the gorge at Yazılıkaya with the entire assembly of the divine, it was Šarruma they gave the embrace of the king.

The chamber that holds that embrace may have been the king’s tomb. If it was, the choice of Šarruma to preside there makes a plain kind of sense, since a personal god was believed to keep guarding the one he loved even past death, watching over the grave. For humbler worshippers his work was quieter and constant. A petition spoken to him would be carried upward to Teshub and Hebat, who sat above him. A prayer even multiplies him into a small intercessory pair, the Šarrumanni, minor spirits who would put in a word with the greater god on a suppliant’s behalf.

His protection travelled outward with the empire that adopted him. Šuppiluliuma the First installed his own son Telipinu as high priest of Šarruma at Aleppo, and worship of the god followed Hittite power into Emar and Ugarit, where families named their children for him. And yet he was always a borrowed god, prominent because the crown willed it and never truly native to the cities that received him. When the Hittite state burned and broke apart around 1200, the great reliefs fell silent. Šarruma did not disappear, but he thinned to a syllable inside people’s names, Ari-Šarruma, Talmi-Šarruma, carried on the tongues of Cilicians and Lycians into the Hellenistic age long after the last temple to him had closed. A god who lived on royal favour kept little of his own once the kings were gone.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Šarruma?

Šarruma is a god of the Hurrians who was later adopted into the Hittite pantheon. He was worshipped as a protective mountain deity and became the personal guardian of Hittite kings, most famously Tudhaliya IV. He originated in the kingdom of Kizzuwatna, where his main cult cities were Kummanni and Lawazantiya.

Who are Šarruma’s parents?

Šarruma was regarded as the son of the storm god Teshub and the great goddess Hebat. In offering lists his name usually appears directly after his mother Hebat, and the two were sometimes worshipped together as a pair. He also had two sisters, the goddesses Allanzu and Kunzišalli.

What animal is associated with Šarruma?

Šarruma is most closely associated with the leopard, on whose spotted back he stands in the reliefs at Yazılıkaya and Malatya. He could also be depicted as a bull, which scholars believe was his oldest form, and he was called the “calf” of the storm god Teshub. His weapon in one Hittite text was a golden lance.

Why was Šarruma important to Hittite kings?

Šarruma served as a personal protective deity for members of the Hittite royal house, believed to shield the king in life and to keep watch over him even in death. Tudhaliya IV adopted him as his own protector and had himself carved in the god’s embrace at the Yazılıkaya sanctuary. Earlier kings such as Tudhaliya III and the heir Urhi-Teshub also linked their names and seals to him.

What is the divine embrace at Yazılıkaya?

The divine embrace is a rock relief in Chamber B of the Yazılıkaya sanctuary near Hattusa, showing Šarruma with his arm around King Tudhaliya IV and his hand grasping the king’s wrist. It expresses the god’s personal protection of the ruler. The chamber may have served as the king’s burial place, with Šarruma stationed there as his eternal guardian.

Related Entries

Teshub, Hepat, Kumarbi, Hedammu, Ullikummi, Illuyanka