Arinna, sun goddess and highest imperial goddess of the Hittites

The sun goddess of Arinna, in short Arinna or Wurušemu, belongs to the oldest layer of the Anatolian pantheon and is of Hattic origin, that is, pre-Indo-European. In Geschichte der hethitischen Religion (1994), Volkert Haas showed that the Hittite great kings officially elevated the Hattic city goddess of Arinna to the highest female imperial deity.

Together with Tarhunna she forms the supreme divine couple of the empire and holds a prominent position in the festival calendar, in the state treaties, and in royal theology.

In her function she is not the sun as a celestial body, but the sovereign of the day and the guarantor of royal dignity. In many inscriptions the Hittite great king calls himself ‘My Sun’, that is, the son or representative of the sun goddess.

In Life and Society in the Hittite World (2002), Trevor Bryce described this theological construction in detail and showed how it grounds the legitimation of kingship.

Arinna differs from the Mesopotamian sun god Šamaš in that she is female; in Anatolia the sun was female, an archaic gender attribution that coincides with the Hattic to Indo-European language boundary and is remarkable in the history of religion.

The Hittite tradition thereby preserves a pre-Indo-European Anatolian heritage within an Indo-European-shaped state religion, a syncretism that Piotr Taracha presented systematically in Religions of Second Millennium Anatolia (2009).

The name Arinna is a place name; the goddess is named after the city in which her main sanctuary was located.

The exact location of Arinna has to this day not been clearly identified archaeologically; proposals focus on sites in northern Anatolia, in particular Alaca Höyük and Sapinuwa. The city name Arinna itself is of Hattic origin and probably means ‘spring’ or ‘well’.

Her Hattic proper name is Wurušemu, literally perhaps ‘Mother of the Earth’ or ‘Mother of the Land’. The Hittite translation is D UTU URU Arinna, ‘Sun deity of the city of Arinna’. In Hurrian she is identified as the equivalent of Hebat, an equation that Queen Puduḫepa explicitly formulates in her famous prayer: ‘Sun goddess of Arinna, my lady, you are queen of all lands; in Ḫatti you gave yourself the name sun goddess of Arinna, in the land that you created as the land of the cedar you gave yourself the name Hebat.’

The etymology and the theology of the name were discussed in detail by Piotr Taracha in Religions of Second Millennium Anatolia (2009).

A particular difficulty is that D UTU can denote not only the sun goddess of Arinna, but also other solar beings such as the ‘Sun goddess of the Earth’ (chthonic) or the male Luwian sun deity Tiwaz. The exact identification must in each case be inferred from the context.

In images Arinna appears as an enthroned goddess with a long, pleated robe, a high polos crown, and a sun disk as an attribute.

In Yazılıkaya, the great rock sanctuary near Ḫattuša, she stands at the head of the female procession of gods and faces her male counterpart Tarhunna in the center of the main chamber A. The winged sun disk above her head is an old Mesopotamian and Aegean symbol that the Hittite pictorial tradition adapted.

On numerous royal seals, for instance the bullae from the Nişantaş archive, the sun disk appears as a royal insignium; there it stands for the protection of the sun goddess over the ruler.

The animal form of the goddess is more rarely attested; individual texts speak of an eagle sitting on her hand, as well as of a lioness as her mount. In the Hattic to Hittite standard cult, those ring-shaped bronze standards with animal finials from Alaca Höyük, the sun disk is used as a central element.

Striking is the small number of free-standing cult images of Arinna. Hittite theology concentrated its iconography on the state-controlled rock reliefs and on seals; statue images in the Mesopotamian sense are barely preserved.

Temple inventories, however, name ‘the sun disk of gold’ and ‘the image of the sun goddess in silver’ as important cult objects, of which nothing has physically survived. In Materia Magica et Medica Hethitica (2003), Volkert Haas described the iconographic tradition in detail.

Unlike Tarhunna or Telipinu, Arinna is barely attested as an acting figure in myths. She appears above all in prayers, hymns, and treaty texts.

The most important source is the prayer of Queen Puduḫepa (CTH 384), in which the great queen asks the goddess for the healing of her ailing husband Ḫattušili III. The prayer contains a detailed theology of the goddess as guarantor of kingship and is one of the most literarily elaborate texts of Hittite religion.

In the myths Arinna usually appears as ‘mother’ of other gods, above all as the mother of the weather god of the sky and of the moon and grain goddess Mezzulla, who is perhaps a hypostasis of herself.

In an Old Hittite festival ritual she is portrayed as an arbiter in the council of the gods. In a fragmentarily preserved text she laments the disappearance of Telipinu and commissions an eagle to search for him; this eagle roams the world but does not find him.

In the history of religion this paucity of myths is typical of the Hittite pantheon configuration: the supreme imperial gods are less narrative figures than legal and political guarantors.

Mythic activity is shifted onto second generations such as Telipinu, Sarruma, or Ullikummi. In Hittite Myths (1998), Gary Beckman highlighted this as a typical feature of the Hittite state religion.

The cult of the sun goddess of Arinna was closely intertwined with kingship. In the Hittite festival calendar the great spring festival AN.TAḪ.ŠUM was dedicated to her, among others, a 38-day festival cycle whose texts are readily accessible in the edition by Volkert Haas and Liane Jakob-Rost.

During the festival the great king visited the most important cult sites of the goddess in Ḫattuša, Arinna, and Nerik in a ritualized sequence of travel.

Her temple in Ḫattuša is referred to in the texts as the ‘temple of the sun goddess’ and is identified with the Great temple in the Lower City district.

In the inventory there are silver and gold sun disks, cult robes, bull figures, and clay balls whose ritual function has to this day not been fully clarified.

In The Organization of the Anatolian Local Cults (2003), Joost Hazenbos analyzed the priestly hierarchy: at its head was a SANGA priest, to whom several female priestesses and cult personnel were subordinate.

A special feature is the burial of the kings under her patronage: the šalliš waštaiš, ‘the great sin’, as the Hittite euphemism for the death of the king goes, was carried out with a 14-day burial ritual that describes the transformation of the king into a divine being under the protection of the sun goddess.

The edition by Heinrich Otten, Hethitische Totenrituale (1958), remains authoritative to this day. In the course of the ritual ‘the king becomes a god’, as the Hittite formula says; he leaves the world of mortals and joins the sun goddess in the sky.

Arinna was the protector of the king and of kingship; her apotropaic function concerned the imperial dynasty less than the individual person. On royal seals the winged sun disk stands above the royal name; it was at once an identity sign and a protective formula.

In vassal treaties she is invoked as the second deity after Tarhunna, with the same penalty formula: a breach of loyalty draws down her destructive wrath.

In the private sphere the veneration of the sun goddess is less well documented. Occasionally there appear women who, with the help of the ‘Old Woman’ (ḪAR.ḪAR), direct a ritual to the sun goddess, for instance in cases of infertility or serious illness.

The Sun goddess of the Earth, an independent hypostasis with a chthonic, underworldly function, is also frequently invoked in these rituals; she is not identical with the sun goddess of Arinna, but is theologically closely related.

The transition from the daytime sky to the underworld takes place through the double function of the sun: morning and evening it crosses the horizon and thereby passes between the worlds.

From a religious-studies perspective the double function of the sun goddess as heavenly queen and chthonic ruler of the underworld is remarkable; it shows the close interweaving of day, night, and death in the Hittite worldview. iWell Guard regards Arinna as a historical figure of religious history without any present-day connection to healing claims.

Apotropaic sun disks were worked into door and window lintels, a practice attested archaeologically at several Hittite sites.

The female gender assignment of the sun is unusual in the Ancient Near East; in Akkadian Šamaš is male, likewise in Ugaritic Šapaš (which, despite the formal masculine, is interpreted as female), in Phoenician Šapšu. The Hattic tradition stands here closer to the Germanic Sól, the Lithuanian Saulė, and the Japanese Amaterasu.

In the history of religion the female gender of the sun is interpreted as an archaic feature that was pushed back by the influence of patriarchal storm-god theologies.

Even in Anatolia itself Arinna is not the only female solar figure. The Luwians knew Tiwaz as a male sun god, but alongside him also the earth sun goddess. The differentiation between various solar hypostases was presented systematically by Volkert Haas in Materia Magica et Medica Hethitica (2003).

The Hattic female sun, the Hittite female sun, the Luwian male sun, and the chthonic Sun goddess of the Earth form a complex solar pantheon that can be disentangled only through careful analysis of the sources.

In her function as royal protective goddess Arinna is comparable with Hebat from the Hurrian pantheon and with the Mesopotamian Ištar as imperial protector; here too the imperial-pantheon type of the Late Bronze Age becomes apparent, in which the highest female deity takes on dynastic functions.

Arinna is well documented in current research. Important studies are available from Volkert Haas, Daniel Schwemer, Piotr Taracha, Gary Beckman, and Itamar Singer. In Hittite Prayers (SBL 2002), Singer translated and commented on the most important prayers to Arinna.

The Puduḫepa prayer ranks among the literarily outstanding sources of ancient Near Eastern religious history and is frequently cited in comparative religious studies as well.

In modern Turkey Arinna has hardly been received in popular culture; local tourism initiatives in Çorum and Yozgat, however, have begun to use the sun disk of Alaca Höyük as a cultural symbol.

The winged sun disk appears in the logo of the Turkish Hittitology congress. A spiritual reception in the neo-pagan sense, as is common with Nordic goddesses, is largely absent for Arinna.

In religious studies, Arinna is today discussed above all in comparative studies of the Late Bronze Age, of the theology of female kingship, and of Hattic to Hittite religious dynamics.

Current research priorities lie in the precise identification of her city, in the relationship to the ‘Sun goddess of the Earth’, and in the comparative investigation of female solar theologies in the Ancient Near East.

The following standard works cover the most important aspects of research on Arinna and are entry points into the Hittite source material. They combine cuneiform text editions, archaeological findings, and religious-historical syntheses. The list follows the iWell Guard convention of naming established standard works before more recent specialized studies.

Anyone who wants to delve deeper into the material will find in the works named further bibliographies on the Hittite festival calendars, on the AN.TAḪ.ŠUM festival cycle, and on the theology of female kingship of the Late Bronze Age.

In particular, Itamar Singer’s Hittite Prayers, with the full translation of the Puduḫepa prayer, is indispensable as an entry into the primary sources.