The Epic of Kumarbi and the Theogony of Hesiod

Abstract

The Epic of Kumarbi is the latest of a number of epic works which have been recovered and restored to us by patient scholarship from the wreckage of the royal library of the Hittite Emperors at Hattušaš (Bogaz-köy). This particular text, however, is doubly noteworthy: for the sake of the story which it tells, and because it is evidently in essence not merely a piece of Hittite literature, but, in the form of a translation, a glimpse of another, more remote and virtually lost literature. For although this text is written in the normal Hittite language, the names of the divinities who play the chief roles in the drama are in fact not Hittite at all. A few are Babylonian, the rest Hurrian. That is to say, they are the gods of an important people or group of peoples who dwelt in south-eastern Anatolia, north Syria and north Mesopotamia, and spoke a language akin neither to the Indo-European speech of the Hittites nor to the Semitic languages. During the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C. many of these people were incorporated into the Hittite Empire, and their gods were received into the hospitality of the Hittite Pantheon. This text is evidently the translation of a Hurrian saga, and it is even reported that fragments exist (or existed) of the Hurrian original, but they have not been published. The present text originally extended over several tablets, many of which now survive, if at all, only in very battered form. The resultant lacunae make it very difficult for us to follow with certainty the meaning and sequence of action in the surviving fragments. The saga appears to be in three parts: The Struggle for the Kingship of Heaven, The Song of Ullikummi and Kumarbi and the Hero of the Flood. We shall be content for our present purpose with giving a summary of this poem. And a strangely primitive and barbarous story it is, doubtless of very great antiquity.