Solar and Chthonic Deities in Ancient Anatolia: The Evolution of the Chthonic Solar Deity in Hittite Religion (original) (raw)

2022, Presented at the conference "Theonyms, Panthea and Syncretisms in Hittite Anatolia and Northern Syria – March 25-26, 2022"

Within the study of the history of ancient Near Eastern religions, it has become commonplace to assign deities to typological categories that transcend geographical areas and historical periods. Common examples are the Ištar-goddesses or the Storm-gods, where the typology was endemically manifested through the application of a widely understood label – such as a logogramm or foreign name – in order to identify a deity whose significance may have been limited to a particular location or region. This can certainly be said of the Anatolian solar deities, who were most commonly labeled DUTU; however, by no means can we assign all of the Anatolian solar deities to a single typological category. Instead, very distinct types can be identified among the “solar deities”, implying that this category was more “semantic” than “typological”. A broader approach to the analysis of panthea is that, which identifies certain spheres of competency possessed by individual or groups of deities: fertility, fecundity, family, childbirth, magic, nature, war, royal authority, etc., most of which reflect various aspects of the organization and limits of human society. A deity can, of course, possess more than one competency: the Storm-god is responsible for rainfall and is thus associated with agricultural fertility; but at the same time he is one of the most significant deities for the Hittite royal ideology. Since the category of solar deities is in itself very heterogeneous, it is not suprising that the various solar deities, when compared to one another, possess very different spheres of compentency. Perhaps the most counter-intuitive of these is the association of a solar deity with the chthonic realm – the best-known example being the “Sun-goddess of the earth”. This paper will explore the origins and development of the overlap of the “solar deity” category with the type of the “netherworld goddess”. Some have claimed this phenomenon to be inherent to ancient indigenous Anatolian Hattian religion. Others explicitly rule out this possibility, and seek to pinpoint the origin of the solar deity of the netherworld in Syria or Mesopotamia. Simultaneously, other Anatolian goddesses are also connected with the chthonic sphere, such as Lelwani. Some constellations of chthonic deities include a solar deity alongside other deities whose names – at the etymological level at least – are closely related to the names of Anatolian solar deities, e.g. šiwatt- (cf. Luwian Tiwad- ‘Sun-god’), which can also be written logographically with the sign U₄ ‘day’ (which can also be read as UTU ‘Sun’), or Izzištanu, which likely contains the Hattian name of the solar deity (Ištanu-, the Hittite variant of Hattian Eštan). Are these simply arbitrary or inadvertent connections with the solar deity, and thus of no great significance? Or were these overt attempts to underline the role of a particular solar deity in the netherworld? This paper will serve as a case study exploring the effectiveness and accuracy of categorizing deities typologically or according to spheres of competency, and what alternatives might exist to describe more complicated or unusual phenomena, as for example the solar deities.