Teshub

L. Warbinek, F. Giusfredi, Theonyms, Panthea and Syncretisms in Hittite Anatolia and Northern Syria. Proceedings of the Workshop Helds in Verona, March 25–264, 2022

The spectacular finds at Göbekli Tepe and Nevali Çorı: monolithic pillars representing stylized humans decorated with a large variety of animals, are the representation of an animist cosmos, in which animals and plants being may appear as persons, capable of will. Çatal Höyük represents a stage in which gods started to be shaped: the bull represented the Storm-god (a concept which reached the Classical period), the stag the god of the wild fauna, and female figurines symbolized the Mother-goddess. In Egypt, where gods where usually represented by animals, zoomorphism presents a continuity which ended only with the introduction of Christianity. The archaeological finds from Kaneš and the Hittite texts document an extraordinary continuity: each deity was represented by an animal, portraited in the vessel with which the celebrant (the royal couple or also a priest) reached a kind of communion with the god in drinking of the same wine and eating of the same bread.

The Conference Book of the General Union of Arab Archeologists, 2019

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

Acts of the IXth International Congress of Hittitologygy, 2019

Altorientalische Forschungen, 2013

Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore, 2005

"Despite the traditional opposition between the 'Egyptian' to the 'Other', Egypt always maintained contact with its neighbors (Nubia, the deserts, the oasis and Near East) and these interconnections also affected religion: foreign deities were imported into the Egyptian pantheon, but there were also deities of Egyptian origin that were worshipped in these external and marginal regions (for example Hathor or Seth, the principal 'border crosser' god). During the Old Kingdom evidence for foreign deities, (i.e. deities which were imported into Egypt from the outside at a specific time) are extremely rare. However, some deities have been associated with Egypt’s frontier zones, such as: Ash, attested from Protodynastic times; Dedun, mentioned only in the Pyramid Texts; Ha, the “god of desert”; Sopdu, sometimes depicted as a man of Asiatic origin, and Igai, apparently bound to the oasis. Yet their foreign origin is doubtful, despite the presence of determinate epithets and iconographies. The same happens also in the case of minor deities such as Seret, Khensut (?) and Anuket. The aim of this contribution is to analyze the evidence regarding these deities during the Old Kingdom in order to shed light on the question of their 'probable' foreign origin."

NABU, 2023