Post

The Anatolian Myth of Illuyanka
Text and notes: https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/77487
Story and commentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UqmQJ-VkbI

Last week, Abraham bought from Ephron the Hittite his field and the cave of Machpelah that sat thereon to bury his dead for 400 shekels of silver, and so I figure this would be an opportune time to look at the Hittites. It is unclear if there is a link between the Biblical Hittites and the eponymous historical empire. The first are identified as the children of Heth (second son of Canaan, who was the youngest son of Ham, and who was singled out for a curse by his grandfather Noah on account of Ham's indiscretion), while the latter take the name from the Hatti people and the city of Hattusa in central Anatolia, and their identification with the Biblical Hittites in the 19th century because of the similarity of names (Hatti and Hetti). The Hittite Empire fell with the phenomenon known as the Bronze Age Collapse (c. 1177 BC), although a group of Neo-Hittite states survived in southern Anatolia and the northern Levant for several centuries into the Iron Age, which were Aramaean and Luwian in culture.

I think Biblical tradition places Abraham at roughly 2000 BC, which actually precedes the historical Hittite Empire (c. 1750-1178 BC), and moreover their occupation of the northern Levant, let alone their collapse and the establishment of the Neo-Hittite states. On the other hand, Israel principally emerges in the historical record during (or just prior to) the early Iron Age and these northern Levantine Neo-Hittite states would likely be relevant in the formation of any associated traditions during this period. Given how early in the project I am, I'd prefer to err on the side of older works, from which I thought I'd pull the stories of Illuyanka this week.

In these stories, the Storm-god of Nerik (in north-central Anatolia near the Black Sea) battles a great primordial serpent called Illuyanka as the central ritual around the spring festival of Puruli. Normally, the Hittite storm god would be Tarḫunna, although it is also closely identified with the Luwian Tarḫunz from southern Anatolia and the Hurrian Teshub; however, in this account, the only named identification I've seen is with Zaliyanu, which is supposed to be the name of a divine mountain responsible for bestowing rain on the city. The actual work is rather short. In addition to a transliteration of the Hittite text, and several pages of notes, the pdf available through the link only has about three pages of a translation that is highly fractured in places and split between two stories. However, I found what I think is a good podcast that discusses some of the nuances around the story while making a reasonable compromise between creatively filling in the gaps and staying faithful to the original work found in Catalogue des Textes Hittites (CTH) 321.