Ullikummi

Kumarbi left Urkis carrying a grudge, and what he found on the road was a rock.

The tablets are matter of fact about what happened next. He lay with the stone, the stone conceived, and what came of it was not shaped like a child. Divine midwives lifted the newborn onto his knees, the way midwives did for every god’s son, and Kumarbi looked at the thing he had made and began to laugh. He rocked it. Then he gave it a name that was also a list of orders. Let his name be Ullikummi. Let him go up into heaven for kingship. Let him press down the fine city of Kummiya. Let him strike the storm god and beat him away like chaff, tread him into the ground like an ant, snap Tasmisu off like a dry reed, scatter all the gods down out of the sky like flour, and break them like empty pots.

The name is usually read as an instruction as well: destroy Kummiya, the town in the hills where Teshub kept his house. He was a weapon before he was anything else, and he never became anything else.

Kumarbi’s next thought was practical. A small monster can be killed. So he sent his vizier Impaluri to fetch the Irsirra goddesses, and told them to carry the child down into the dark earth and set him on the right shoulder of Upelluri, a god so old and so far inside his own thoughts that heaven and earth had been built on his back without his noticing. On the way the Irsirra stopped to show the baby to Enlil. Enlil needed one look. He understood whose child this was and precisely what it was for, and there is a fine sourness in the fact that he did nothing about it. The Irsirra carried on down and set the stone on the shoulder, and the shoulder did not feel it.

Then Ullikummi grew.

He grew standing in the sea, at a rate the poem measures in units meant for ploughland: not inches, but the length of a field in a month. Nothing about it was violent. There was no rampage and no roar. A column of stone simply got taller in the water, day after day, while the sea folded around him like a garment and never rose past his belt because he kept outgrowing it. Salt dried white on him. He could not watch the sun come up over his own shoulders and he could not hear the water at his feet, because he had been made without eyes or ears, and that turns out to matter more than anything else in the story.

The sun god found him first. He was travelling his usual road when he looked down and saw a shape standing in the water that had no business being there, and he went straight to Kummiya. Teshub and his brother Tasmisu put food in front of their guest, which was the correct thing to do, and the sun god sat with the bread untouched and could not bring himself to eat. That detail does more work than any description of the monster could.

Teshub went to look for himself. He took Tasmisu, and their sister joined them on the road, the goddess the Hittite scribes wrote as Ishtar and the Hurrians knew as Sauska, and the three climbed Mount Hazzi above the mouth of the Orontes, the peak the Semitic world called Zaphon and the Greeks later called Kasion. From up there the whole eastern sea is visible, and standing out of it, the Stone. Teshub sat down on the mountain and wept. His sister tried to find something to say that would help. The tablet breaks before she finds it.

What she tried next had worked before. Kumarbi had already sent one monster at her brother, the sea serpent Hedammu, and she had taken that one apart with bathing, ornament and music, coaxing it out of its own menace. So she washed and anointed herself, took up the cymbals and the drum, went down to the shore and sang. A wave rose out of the sea and told her she was wasting a performance on a thing that could not hear the song or see the singer.

She stopped singing.

The war that followed was a plain defeat. Tasmisu harnessed the bulls and made the war cart ready, seventy gods went out behind the warrior god Astabi, and none of it left a mark on him. Ullikummi came on as far as Kummiya itself, close enough to put Hepat in danger inside her own house. She sent her servant Takiti out to find her husband and Takiti came back with nothing, and it fell to Tasmisu to climb the tower to the palace roof and tell the queen of heaven that Teshub had lost.

Ea saved them, and he did it with cosmology rather than a fight. He went down to Apsuwa, then to Enlil, then to Upelluri himself, and asked the old giant whether he had noticed anything unusual. Upelluri’s answer is the best line in the poem. He said that when heaven and earth were set upon him and then cut apart he had felt nothing at all, so he could hardly be expected to know who Ea meant, although now that it was mentioned there did seem to be something on his shoulder. Ea had to turn the shoulder round so that Upelluri could see what was growing out of it. Then he called on the Former Gods, the retired generation who live in the underworld, and had them bring out of storage the ancient cutting tool that had once parted sky from ground, and with that blade he sawed Ullikummi loose at the feet.

That was all it took. His strength was never his own. It came up through the soles of his feet out of the body he was standing on, and once the join was cut he was a very large rock in some water. Ea sent word that the gods could fight again. Teshub went back out. The Stone made a speech first, and the speech is his father’s words repeated almost exactly, the kingship, the city, the chaff, the ant, because nobody had told him anything had changed and he had no way of finding out.

The resemblance to Hesiod was noticed as soon as the tablets were read: a run of sky kings each unseated by his own son, and a final monstrous challenger raised out of the earth against the new ruler of heaven. Zeus fights Typhon on that same north Syrian coast, at the mountain the Greeks called Kasion. That parallel is an argument made by modern scholars, by Hans Gustav Guterbock in 1948 and by Walter Burkert afterwards, and not a claim any Hittite scribe made, but it is most of the reason a broken Bronze Age poem about a rock is read outside Hittitology at all.

How it ends is anybody’s guess. The tablet that should carry the last battle has never been found, and the surviving copies stop with the boast. Guterbock argued that the missing fourth tablet must have held the storm god’s victory, on the reasonable ground that Teshub is the king of the Hurrian gods, and he could not have been that if the rock had won.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Ullikummi?

Ullikummi is a giant made of stone from Hurrian myth, known from the Hittite tablets of the Kumarbi cycle found at Hattusa. He was fathered by the deposed god Kumarbi on a rock, grew upright in the sea until he reached the sky, and was blind and deaf by construction. The tablets often call him simply “the Stone”.

Why did Kumarbi create Ullikummi?

Kumarbi made Ullikummi as a weapon to take back the kingship of heaven from his son Teshub, the storm god. At the naming, Kumarbi ordered the child to rise into heaven for the kingship, crush Teshub’s city of Kummiya, and beat the gods out of the sky. Ullikummi was the last of several champions Kumarbi raised for that purpose, following the sea serpent Hedammu.

How was Ullikummi defeated?

Ea worked out that Ullikummi was invulnerable only because he was joined to the shoulder of Upelluri, the giant who carries heaven and earth. Ea had the Former Gods bring out the ancient cutting tool that had once separated sky from ground, and used it to saw the stone giant free at the feet. That severed his strength and let the gods fight him again.

Why did Ishtar’s music fail against Ullikummi?

Ishtar, the Hittite name for the Hurrian goddess Sauska, had defeated Kumarbi’s earlier monster Hedammu by seducing it with washing, ornament and song, so she tried the same approach on Ullikummi. A wave rose out of the sea and told her to stop, because the stone giant had no eyes and no ears and could neither see her nor hear the music. She gave up and returned to her brother Teshub.

Does the Song of Ullikummi have an ending?

No surviving tablet contains the ending. The text breaks off with Ullikummi boasting, still repeating his father’s orders, unaware that Ea has already cut away his power. Hans Gustav Guterbock argued that a lost fourth tablet must have described Teshub’s final victory, since Teshub holds the kingship in Hurrian religion and could not have done so had he lost.

Related Entries

Kumarbi, Teshub, Hedammu, Hepat, Illuyanka, Enlil, Enki, Anu, Ishtar, Typhon, Zeus, Cronus, Atlas, Talos, Golem