{"it":{"id":"TX041","kind":"text","sub":"Hittite/Hurrian","name":"Kumarbi Cycle (Song of Kumarbi / Kingship in Heaven)","place":"Berlin","date":"c.14th-13th c. BCE","oldest":"Hattusa tablets c.13th c. BCE","inst":"Boğazköy archives; e.g. KUB 33.120 (Ankara/Berlin)","lang":"Hittite","src":[239,601],"lat":52.521,"lon":13.396,"tags":["Near East","Sky beings"],"sum":"Over 3,000 years ago Hittite scribes wrote of a god who bit off his king's genitals and became pregnant with his overthrower.","why":"It is the clearest case of a Near Eastern myth turning up, centuries later, as Greek myth.","nfacts":0,"nsrc":2,"yt":"Compare with TX033.","rel":["TX033","TX047"],"hook":"A Hittite tablet tells of a god who bit off his king's genitals, swallowed them, and became pregnant."},"S":{"239":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumarbi"],"601":["Hethitologie-Portal Mainz/Würzburg: CTH 344, Song of Kumarbi (Kingship in Heaven)","https://www.hethport.uni-wuerzburg.de/txhet_myth/q.php?i=344"]},"rec":{"id":"TX041","alias":[],"ms":[],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA142","a":"Kingship in heaven = ET hierarchy.","who":"Sitchin","main":"Source for Hesiod's succession myth (diffusion).","ms":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumarbi","st":"unresolved","n":"interpretive claim; no measurable data","nl":1}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"pas":[],"tr":[],"mo":[],"tl":[],"wit":[],"tx":{"mainstream_reading":"Source for Hesiod's succession myth (diffusion).","alternative_reading":"Kingship in heaven = ET hierarchy.","alt_proponent":"Sitchin","mistranslation_or_dispute":"Clear diffusion case.","key_theme":"succession of sky kings Alalu, Anu, Kumarbi, Teshub","language":"Hittite","physical_object_institution":"Boğazköy archives; e.g. KUB 33.120 (Ankara/Berlin)","composition_date":"c.14th-13th c. BCE","oldest_ms_date":"Hattusa tablets c.13th c. BCE","b":"V"},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"S0516","t":"en.wikipedia.org","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumarbi"},{"id":"S2602","t":"Hethitologie-Portal Mainz/Würzburg: CTH 344, Song of Kumarbi (Kingship in Heaven)","u":"https://www.hethport.uni-wuerzburg.de/txhet_myth/q.php?i=344"}],"sum":"\"Do not rejoice over your belly, for I have placed a burden in your belly.\" The speaker is Anu, the sky god, beaten and fleeing. His conqueror, Kumarbi, has just bitten off and swallowed his genitals. Anu's parting words explain what that means. \"First, I have impregnated you with the mighty Storm-god. Second, I have impregnated you with the River Tigris, not to be borne. Third, I have impregnated you with the mighty Tašmišu. I have placed three frightful deities as a burden in your belly, and you will end up banging your head against the rocks of Mt. Tašša!\"\n\nThis is the opening episode of one of the most remarkable bodies of literature from the ancient Near East, a group of myths that scholars call the Kumarbi Cycle. It has been described as \"unquestionably the best-known belletristic work discovered in the Hittite archives.\"\n\nKumarbi was a Hurrian god, honoured as the \"father of gods\" by a people whose world stretched from Anatolia to the Zagros Mountains. His worship is attested from the early second millennium BCE at Mari and later at Ugarit, Alalakh and elsewhere; his figure appears among the gods carved at the rock sanctuary of Yazılıkaya. The Hittites, who ruled central Anatolia, took him into their own pantheon.\n\nThe myths about him survive mainly in Hittite translations, found in the royal archive at Hattusa, the Hittite capital near the modern village of Boğazköy in Turkey. Their themes, the Hittitologist Gary Beckman has noted, reflect Hurrian rather than Hittite theology. According to Alfonso Archi, they arrived early in the fourteenth century BCE, when Hurrian culture was gaining influence at the Hittite court.\n\nThe Hittites called each text a \"song\". The first, conventionally the Song of Kumarbi, is best known from a tablet catalogued as KUB 33.120, dated to the first decades of the fourteenth century BCE. It is poorly preserved: only about 125 to 150 of its original 350 lines survive. In 2007 scholars identified new fragments that joined to it, including a colophon, the scribe's closing note. It gave the work's own title, read as \"song of departure\" or \"song of emergence,\" and the name of the scribe who copied it, Ašḫapala. The scholar Amir Gilan has called it \"one of the finest and most sophisticated works of literature to survive from the Hittite world.\"\n\nThe song opens by inviting the primeval gods to listen. Then it lists three kings in heaven, without explaining where any of them came from. The first, Alalu, rules for nine years until his cupbearer Anu overthrows him and he flees to the \"Dark Earth\", the underworld. Anu rules for nine years, then his own cupbearer, Kumarbi, \"scion of Alalu\", turns on him. Beckman has suggested that the nine-year reigns may echo the nine months of human pregnancy, given what follows.\n\nAfter Anu's taunt, Kumarbi spits out some of the seed. It falls on a mountain, which becomes pregnant with Tašmišu, but two of the children remain inside him. He travels to Nippur for advice. In the end the storm god Teshub argues that the only safe way out is through Kumarbi's skull. The goddesses of fate split it open and then mend it \"like a garment.\" Kumarbi wants to devour the newborn storm god, but he is given a stone instead and breaks his teeth on it.\n\nTeshub's birth begins a long war. In each later song, Kumarbi, described as cunning, produces a new challenger to bring the storm god down. The songs keep their audiences in suspense by letting each plan seem to work for a while.\n\nIn the Song of Ḫedammu, Kumarbi fathers a voracious sea monster with the daughter of the sea. The fighting grows so fierce that the wise god Ea rebukes both sides before the assembly of the gods, in a speech of striking practicality. \"Why are you destroying mankind? They will not give sacrifices to the gods. They will not burn cedar and incense to you.\" If humanity is destroyed, he warns, even Teshub, \"Kummiya's heroic king, will himself work the plow.\"\n\nIn the Song of Ullikummi, Kumarbi finds an enormous stone at a cold spring and fathers a stone giant on it. The child's name, Ullikummi, means \"Destroy Kumme!\", the storm god's city. Kumarbi has him hidden in the underworld on the shoulder of Upelluri, a being who carries the world like the Greek Atlas, where it can grow out of the storm god's sight. The storm god's forces cannot defeat it, and it blocks the temple of Teshub's wife, Ḫepat. At last Ea goes to the primordial gods in the underworld and recovers an ancient tool once used to separate earth from heaven, with which he plans to cut the giant from Upelluri's shoulder. The ending is lost, but the storm god presumably wins.\n\nFrom the 1940s scholars noticed that Hesiod's Greek Theogony tells a similar sequence: Ouranos, the sky, castrated by his son Kronos, who is overthrown by Zeus, while a stone is swallowed in place of a god. A connection is now widely accepted, though Beckman doubts the Greeks took every shared element directly from these songs and suggests a wider Mediterranean pool of stories. The differences are real too. Kumarbi uses his teeth, not a sickle, and kingship in the Hittite story does not pass simply from father to son. Scholars also compare the cycle with the Ugaritic Baal Cycle and with a Mesopotamian account of divine succession known as the Theogony of Dunnu.\n\nThe ancient-astronaut writer Zecharia Sitchin read the \"kingship in heaven\" as a record of a real ruling hierarchy of visitors. That is interpretation; nothing in the tablets offers measurable data for it. Scholars read the songs as Hurrian theology, translated and performed at the Hittite court, and as part of a family of succession myths found across the region.\n\nThe songs remain broken. Their endings are lost, their order is debated, and some scholars doubt they ever formed a single cycle at all. What survives of the first song's main tablet is a scribe's name, a title, and at most about 150 lines.\n\nThe same story of gods overthrowing their fathers turns up in Hurrian, Hittite, Ugaritic and Greek. Did it travel from one people to the next, or was it something the whole region already knew?","qs":["Kumarbi's story seems to have reached Greece as the tale of Kronos. Who could have carried a myth that far, and how?","Sitchin read the \"kingship in heaven\" as a real ruling hierarchy. What would it take to tell myth from memory?","Why do so many ancient cultures imagine the gods fighting their own fathers for the throne?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Hasanlu-gold-cup.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hasanlu-gold-cup.jpg","title":"Hasanlu-gold-cup.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Emtadbir","cap":"","alt":"Kumarbi Cycle (Song of Kumarbi / Kingship in Heaven): Hasanlu-gold-cup"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2b/Hurrian_foundation_document-AO_19937-IMG_3470-gradient.jpg/1280px-Hurrian_foundation_document-AO_19937-IMG_3470-gradient.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hurrian_foundation_document-AO_19937-IMG_3470-gradient.jpg","title":"Hurrian foundation document-AO 19937-IMG 3470-gradient.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0 fr","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/fr/deed.en","by":"Rama","cap":"","alt":"Kumarbi Cycle (Song of Kumarbi / Kingship in Heaven): Hurrian foundation document-AO 19937-IMG 3470-gradient"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/The_Mutilation_of_Uranus_by_Saturn.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Mutilation_of_Uranus_by_Saturn.jpg","title":"The Mutilation of Uranus by Saturn.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Giorgio Vasari / Cristoforo Gherardi","cap":"Cronus (Saturn) castrates his father Uranus, the Greek sky god (before Zeus)"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/80/Troy_Museum_Hittite_Treaty_0022.jpg/1280px-Troy_Museum_Hittite_Treaty_0022.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Troy_Museum_Hittite_Treaty_0022.jpg","title":"Troy Museum Hittite Treaty 0022.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Dosseman","cap":"This is from 1450-1200 (Hittite Imperial period) a terracotta tablet, with a treaty between Alaksandu and Muwatalli). I took the picture in the Troy Museum, but"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"1700 BCE","h":"Oldest certain reference, on a Hurrian tablet","s":[316]},{"v":"c.14th-13th c. BCE","h":"Date","s":[317]},{"v":"Hittite","h":"Language","s":[317]},{"v":"Boğazköy archives","h":"Where the physical copy is held: Boğazköy archives; e.g. KUB 33.120 (Ankara/Berlin)","s":[317]}],"hs":{"316":["Wikipedia: Kumarbi (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumarbi"],"317":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumarbi"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/TX041.webp","w":1280,"h":723,"o":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Hasanlu-gold-cup.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled"}}