Teshub

Two bulls stand harnessed on a limestone wall at Yazılıkaya, and behind them a bearded god in a short kilt lifts a mace above his shoulder. He is not standing on the ground. He is standing on two other gods, mountains with human heads and shoulders, bowed under his weight like footstools. His cap is tall and conical and ringed with horns. The toes of his shoes curl up at the tip in the Anatolian fashion, a detail so specific and so domestic that it undercuts the whole performance, and the sculptors kept it anyway. The Hurrians called him Teššub, and for the better part of four centuries he was the nearest thing the ancient Near East had to a king in the sky.

His weapons are always the same two. In one hand a mace or a shafted axe, held clear and raised. In the other a bolt shaped like a three-pronged fork, which is what lightning looks like when a craftsman has to render it in stone. The bulls in front of him have names, Šeri and Ḫurri, and they are gods in their own right, receiving offerings alongside their master. Hurrian texts pair them with day and night. When the chariot moves, thunder is the sound of the wheels.

The rain came in off the mountains in late autumn, over the wheat and barley plains where the Hurrians lived, and it smelled of wet dust before it smelled of anything else. Herdsmen watched the light go green above the Taurus and got the animals down. This was the whole of his business with humanity, and it was more than enough to make him the most expensive god in the region to keep happy. His great cult centre was Kummiya, a northern mountain city; his other, and the one that mattered politically, was Aleppo, where the storm god’s temple on the citadel mound was rebuilt and enlarged across a thousand years. Hittite kings invoked him at the head of treaty oath lists. Break the tablet, and the storm god would come for your fields, your line and your name.

He did not inherit that position. He took it, and the taking is the strangest succession story to survive from the Bronze Age. The Song of Kumarbi, copied out in Hittite in the archives at Ḫattuša, opens with Alalu on the throne of heaven and Anu, god of the sky, serving him as cupbearer. After nine years Anu strikes, Alalu flees down into the dark earth, and Anu takes the throne with his own cupbearer, Kumarbi, standing behind him. After another nine years Kumarbi strikes in turn. Anu tries to escape upward into the sky, Kumarbi drags him down by the feet and bites off his genitals, and then makes the mistake of swallowing. Anu, from midair, starts laughing. He tells Kumarbi exactly what he has just done to himself: he is now pregnant, with the mighty storm god Teshub, with the river Aranzaḫ that men call the Tigris, and with Tašmišu who will be the storm god’s brother and attendant. The tablet breaks and mends badly around the birth itself, and the ancient scribes seem to have disagreed about how Teshub got out of his father. What follows is not in doubt. Teshub took the throne of heaven from Kumarbi, and Kumarbi spent the rest of the cycle trying to get it back.

He did not try with armies. He tried with children. In the Song of Ḫedammu he fathers a sea serpent on a daughter of the Sea, a thing with an appetite that empties the coastlands, and the gods cannot fight it. Teshub’s sister Šauška handles it instead. She bathes, perfumes herself, takes musicians down to the shore and sings until the serpent hauls itself up out of the water to look at her, and then she gets it drunk. That is the solution. The storm god keeps his throne because his sister brought better beer than the ocean had.

The second attempt nearly worked. Kumarbi lay with an enormous rock, and the rock bore a child of diorite, blind, deaf, sexless, and entirely unpersuadable. Ullikummi was set on the right shoulder of Upelluri, an old giant holding up heaven and earth who was so vast he had not noticed either being laid on him in the first place. The stone grew there, upward through the sea, a cubit a day. When Teshub climbed Mount Ḫazzi with his brother to look at the thing rising out of the water, he sat down on the mountain and wept. He fought it. Seventy gods fought it. The lightning went into it and did nothing, because you cannot frighten a stone that has never seen or heard anything, and it went on growing until it stood at the gate of Kummiya with its shoulder against Teshub’s own city.

The answer came from Ea, the clever god of the deep, who went to Upelluri and asked whether he felt anything unusual. The giant said his right shoulder ached a little. Ea then went into the storehouses of the primeval gods and brought out the ancient copper cutting tool, the saw that had severed heaven from earth at the beginning, and with it he sheared Ullikummi off at the feet. The stone lost its footing on the giant’s shoulder, and after that it could be beaten.

What Teshub can do is written into the landscape he governed. He brings the rain and withholds it, throws the bolt, breaks the enemy’s chariotry with weather, guarantees oaths and enforces them, and stands as the guarantor of the king’s own authority. He is the god who sets the order of the world upright and keeps it there.

What he cannot do is win alone. Every crisis in his own myth cycle is resolved by somebody else: by Šauška’s cunning, by Ea’s memory of where the old tools are kept, by his brother, by his vizier, by the seventy gods who show up and lose with him. He can be deposed exactly as he deposed, and the whole cycle exists to make that point. His lightning is useless against anything without senses. And when Ḫattuša burned around 1200 BCE and the tablets stopped being copied, the god did not so much die as shrink, surviving in the small Neo-Hittite kingdoms of the south under the Luwian name Tarḫunza, still bearded, still holding the axe, still standing on a bull, ruling a great deal less. The pattern he is caught in outlived him too. A century or two later, a Greek poet wrote down a succession of sky kings ending in a storm god with a thunderbolt, and the sequence is close enough to Kumarbi’s that scholars have argued about the route ever since.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Teshub?

Teshub is the Hurrian god of storms, thunder and rain, and the king of the gods in Hurrian and Hittite myth. He seized the throne of heaven from his father Kumarbi and spent the rest of the Kumarbi Cycle defending it against monsters Kumarbi created to unseat him. The Hittites identified him with their own storm god Tarḫunna, and by the last centuries of their empire he stood at the head of the state pantheon.

What does Teshub look like?

Teshub is shown as a bearded god in a short belted kilt and a tall horned conical cap, wearing shoes with upturned toes, holding a mace or axe raised in one hand and a forked lightning bolt in the other. At the rock sanctuary of Yazılıkaya he stands on the shoulders of two mountain gods. He is also depicted riding a chariot pulled by his sacred bulls, Šeri and Ḫurri.

How was Teshub born?

Teshub was conceived when Kumarbi bit off and swallowed the genitals of the sky god Anu during a fight for the throne of heaven. Anu told Kumarbi that he had made himself pregnant with three beings: Teshub, the river Aranzaḫ that mortals call the Tigris, and Tašmišu. The surviving tablets are damaged at exactly the point where the birth is described, so how Teshub emerged is unclear.

How was Ullikummi defeated?

Ullikummi, the blind and deaf diorite giant Kumarbi fathered on a rock, was defeated not by Teshub’s lightning but by the god Ea. Ea fetched the ancient copper cutting tool that had originally separated heaven from earth and used it to sever Ullikummi from the shoulder of the giant Upelluri, where the stone had been standing and growing. Once cut free of his footing, Ullikummi could be beaten.

Why was Teshub important to the Hittites?

Teshub controlled the rain that the grain harvests of Anatolia and northern Syria depended on, which made him the most important god to keep satisfied across a very large region. Hittite kings placed him at the head of the divine witnesses in their treaties, so breaking a sworn agreement meant inviting the storm god’s destruction. His temple on the citadel of Aleppo was one of the longest-lived sanctuaries in the ancient Near East.

Related Entries

Kumarbi, Hepat, Šarruma, Ullikummi, Hedammu, Illuyanka, Inara, Allatu, Anu, Enlil, Hadad, Baal, Zeus, Cronus, Typhon