Hepat was the great queen of the Hurrian pantheon, the wife of Teshub, the lady whom the Hittite queen Puduhepa called "my lady, queen of the land of Hatti, of heaven and earth." She was a goddess of the city of Aleppo and of Kummanni in Cilicia. She rode upon the panther, and had with her her son Sharruma, the young storm-god.
Before thisTeshub
Next on the wallShaushka
Curator’s note
What the sources say, and what later tradition added. The sources for this bay
Hepat is attested most fully in the Hittite imperial period, when the Hurrian element in court religion was strong. The hymn of Queen Puduhepa (wife of Hattusili III, mid-13th c. BCE) is among the most personal religious documents to survive from the Hittite world. Hepat was identified by the imperial theologians with the Hittite Sun Goddess of Arinna; the syncretism is one of the clearest cases in the ancient Near East of two distinct goddesses being deliberately fused for political-religious purposes.
Kin in the sources
Each tie is quoted from the entry that states it.
- Consort ofTeshub
the wife of Teshub, the lady whom the Hittite queen Puduhepa called
Parent ofSharrumaand had with her her son Sharruma, the young storm-god
When the sources speak
Dated witnesses for Anatolia. A date marks when the evidence was written down, not when the belief began. The whole timeline
- c. 3400–3000 BCE
- Uruk-period writing and monumental temple economies create the earliest recoverable administrative setting for named divine institutions.
- c. 2900–2350 BCE
- Early Dynastic city-states preserve local cults, hymns, royal inscriptions, and god lists; later copies often transmit older compositions.
- c. 2334–2154 BCE
- The Akkadian Empire expands bilingual and imperial patterns of divine identification without erasing local cult titles.
- c. 2112–2004 BCE
- Ur III administration and scribal schooling standardize many Sumerian literary and liturgical forms.
- c. 2000–1600 BCE
- Old Babylonian schools copy major myths, laments, hymns, debates, and heroic narratives in the form most often used by modern editors.
- c. 1650–1200 BCE
- Hittite and Hurrian archives at Hattusa transmit Anatolian myths, imported Syrian materials, and ritual compositions.
- c. 1400–1190 BCE
- The tablets of Ugarit preserve the Baal Cycle, Kirta, Aqhat, ritual lists, and a dense Late Bronze Age West Semitic pantheon.
- c. 1000–612 BCE
- Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires collect, revise, and politically reinterpret older learned traditions.