The Hurrian religion was the polytheistic religion of the Hurrians, a Bronze Age people of the Near East who chiefly inhabited the north of the Fertile Crescent. While the oldest evidence goes back to the third millennium BCE, it is best attested in cuneiform sources from the second millennium BCE written not only in the Hurrian language, but also Akkadian, Hittite and Ugaritic. It was shaped by contacts between the Hurrians and the various cultures with which they coexisted. As a result, the Hurrian pantheon included both natively Hurrian deities and those of foreign origin, adopted from Mesopotamian, Syrian (chiefly Eblaite and Ugaritic), Anatolian and Elamite beliefs. The culture of the Hurrians was not entirely homogeneous, and different local religious traditions are documented in sources from Hurrian kingdoms such as Arrapha, Kizzuwatna and Mitanni, as well as from cities with sizeable Hurrian populations, such as Ugarit and Alalakh.
Hurrian religion forms one of the best attested influences upon Hittite religion. The Hurrian pantheon is depicted in the rock reliefs from the Hittite sanctuary at Yazılıkaya, which dates to the thirteenth century BCE. Hittite scribes also translated many Hurrian myths into their own language, possibly relying on oral versions passed down by Hurrian singers. Among the best known of these compositions are the cycle of myths describing conflicts between Kumarbi and his son Teššub and the Song of Release. Hurrian influences on Ugaritic and Mesopotamian religion also have been noted, though they are less extensive. Furthermore, it has been argued that the Hurrian myths about a succession struggle between various primordial kings of the gods influenced Hesiod's poem Theogony.
Overview
Hurrians were among the inhabitants of parts of the Ancient Near East, especially the north of the Fertile Crescent. Their presence is attested from Cilicia (Kizzuwatna) in modern Turkey in the west, through the Amik Valley (Mukish), Aleppo (Halab) and the Euphrates valley in Syria, to the modern Kirkuk area (Arrapha) in Iraq in the east. The contemporary term "Hurrian" is derived from words attested in various languages of the Ancient Near East, such as Ḫurri (Hurrian), ḫurvoge (Hurrian), ḫurili (Hittite) and ḫurla (Hittite), which referred respectively to areas inhabited by the Hurrians, the language they spoke, and to the people themselves. It is assumed that these terms were all derived from a Hurrian endonym whose meaning remains unknown. The Mesopotamians often referred to Hurrians as "Subarians", and this name was also applied to them in scholarly literature in the early twentieth century. This term was derived from the geographic name Subartu (Subir), which was a designation for northern areas in Mesopotamian records. The label "Subarian" is now considered obsolete in scholarship.
The term "Hurrian" as used today refers to the cultural and linguistic unity of various groups, and does not designate a single state. The Hurrian language was spoken over a wide area in the Middle and Late Bronze Age, but started to decline in the twelfth century BCE, with only small pockets surviving north of Assyria for some five hundred years after it ceased to be spoken elsewhere. It is now extinct and has no known relatives other than Urartian, known from inscriptions from between the ninth and sixth centuries BCE. It is agreed today that while related, it was not the same language as Hurrian, and separated from it as early as in the third millennium BCE. A distant connection between hypothetical Proto-Hurro-Urartian and an archaic Northeastern Caucasian language has been proposed based on reconstructions, but it is not widely accepted. The vocabulary of Hurrian is poorly understood, there are also no clear rules about the transcription of Hurrian words and spelling might vary in scholarly literature due to individual authors making different decisions regarding the presence of voiced consonants.
The available evidence of the culture of the Hurrians is similarly fragmentary, and does not offer information about all areas inhabited by them in all time periods. There is also no indication that the religious practice of various Hurrian communities was entirely homogeneous. The oldest evidence of Hurrian religious life comes from Urkesh and dates to the third millennium BCE, specifically to the Ur III period. Both of the oldest available sources are royal inscriptions. It is possible that Hurrians were present in the Ancient Near East for much longer, as evidenced by personal names in documents from the Sargonic period and the existence of the Hurrian loanword tibira ("metalworker") in Sumerian.
The Hittite archives of Hattusa are considered to be one of the richest sources of information about Hurrian religion. They consist of both texts written in Hurrian and Hurrian works translated into the Hittite language. Some of them were copies of religious texts from Alalakh, Halab or Kizzuwatna. Several Hurrian ritual texts have also been found during the excavations of Ugarit. There are also references to Hurrian deities in some Akkadian texts from that city. The Amarna letters from king Tushratta of Mitanni and the treaty documents provide evidence about the Hurrian religion as practiced in the Mitanni state. The archives of individual Syrian cities, like Mari, Emar and Alalakh, also contain Hurrian texts. These from the first of these cities date to the reign of Zimri-Lim. The evidence from eastern Hurrian centers is comparatively rare, and pantheons of cities such as Nuzi and Arrapha have to be reconstructed only based on administrative texts. Documents from Nuzi allude to distinct customs such as ancestor worship and maintaining sacred groves. While especially in older scholarship the western and eastern Hurrian pantheons were often treated as separate, Marie-Claude Trémouille notes that the difference should not be exaggerated.
Due to long periods of interchange between Hurrians and other Mesopotamian, Syrian and Anatolian societies it is often impossible to tell which features of Hurrian religion were exclusively Hurrian in origin and which developed through contact with other cultures. As noted by Beate Pongratz-Leisten, transfer of deities likely easily occurred between people who shared a similar lifestyle, such as Hurrians and Mesopotamians, who both were settled urban societies at the time of their first contacts. Religious vocabulary of the Hurrian language was heavily influenced by Akkadian. For example, priests were known as šankunni, a loan from Akkadian šangû. Another term borrowed from this language was entanni, referring to a class of priestesses, derived from entu, itself an Akkadian feminine form of the Sumerian loanword en, "lord."
Gernot Wilhelm highlights that "undue importance has long been attached to the historical significance" of the presence of speakers of an early Indo-European language in the predominantly Hurrian Mitanni empire. Members of its ruling dynasty had names which are linguistically Indo-European and adhered to a number of traditions of such origin, but the historical circumstances of this development are not known. The attested Mitanni deities of Indo-European origin include Indra, Mitra, Varuna and the Nasatya twins, who all only appear in a single treaty between Šattiwaza and the Hittite king Šuppiluliuma I, where they act as tutelary deities of the former. The Hurrianised spellings of their names are Mitra-ššil, Aruna-ššil (or Waruna-ššil), Indra and Našattiyana. It is likely that they were only worshiped by the aristocracy of this kingdom, or just by the ruling dynasty and its circle. At the same time, Mitanni princesses bore theophoric names invoking Ḫepat, king Tushratta referred to Šauška as the "mistress of my land," and as in the other Hurrian areas, the state pantheon was headed by Teššub. The official correspondence of the Mitanni rulers was written in Akkadian or Hurrian.
Evidence from Urartu in most cases cannot be used in the study of Hurrian religion, as the connection between it and Bronze Age Hurrians is almost exclusively linguistic and does not extend to religious practice or pantheon. For instance, the head of the Urartian pantheon, Ḫaldi, appears to be absent from Hurrian sources.
Deities
Hurrians worshiped many deities of varied backgrounds, some of them natively Hurrian, while others adopted from other pantheons or formed through the process of syncretism. Some had "pan-Hurrian" character, while the worship of others was limited to specific locations. A number of deities worshiped by Hurrians in Syria and Kizzuwatna most likely had their origin in a linguistic and religious substrate absorbed first by Eblaites and then, after the fall of Ebla in the third millennium BCE, by Hurrians, who started to arrive in predominantly Amorite Syria in the same time period. Others were Mesopotamian and might have been integrated into the Hurrian pantheon as early as in the third millennium BCE. For example, it has been argued that Nergal was already commonly worshiped by Hurrians in this period. Additionally, logograms of Mesopotamian origin were commonly used to represent the names of Hurrian deities, coexisting in writing with syllabic spellings of their names. Hurrian divine names are often simple and epithet-like, for example Allani means "the lady," Šauška - "the great," and Nabarbi - "she of Nawar." The word referring to gods was eni, plural enna.
As in other cultures of the Ancient Near East, Hurrian gods were imagined as anthropomorphic. They had to be provided with nourishment, which they received in the form of offerings. The myth of Ḫedammu attests that while in theory gods would be capable of laboring themselves to acquire food, it would jeopardize their position in the universe. Gods were represented in the form of statues, often made of precious metals and stones. Such figures typically held symbols which served as the attributes of the given deity. They had to be clothed and anointed, as evidenced by lists of oil offerings. It was believed that if a deity's representation is not treated properly, it might enrage them and result in various repercussions. Lunar and solar eclipses in particular were viewed as a sign of the displeasure of the corresponding deities.
The head of the Hurrian pantheon was Teššub, who was a weather god. While it is assumed that he was not necessarily regarded as the head of the pantheon from the very beginning, he likely already acquired this role in the late third millennium BCE. Daniel Schwemer instead argues that was imagined as the king of gods from the beginning. All Hurrians also worshiped Šauška, whose primary spheres of influence were love and war. She could be depicted in both male and female form, and a ritual text mentions her "female attributes" and "male attributes" side by side. Further deities commonly described as "pan-Hurrian" include Kumarbi, who was the "father of gods," the sun god Šimige, the moon god Kušuḫ, the Mesopotamian god Nergal, Nupatik, whose character and relation to other deities are poorly understood and Nabarbi. , Allani, Ea and Nikkal are also considered major deities in scholarship. Ḫepat, a Syrian deity incorporated into the western Hurrian pantheon, was considered a major goddess in areas which accepted the theology of Halab.