Iyarri, A Compendium of the Ancient Gods

When pestilence struck the Hittite armies on campaign — when soldiers fell suddenly and could not rise — the Hittites looked for the responsible god, and they often named Iyarri, the Luwian-Hittite god of plague. He carried arrows; with them, he could strike a man at any distance, in the camp or in the field; the plague that swept through a Hittite army was, in religious vocabulary, a flight of his shafts.

He appears in the treaty-curses by which Hittite kings bound their vassals — "If you break this oath, may Iyarri shoot you with his plague-arrows" — and in the more ordinary ritual literature of the late Bronze Age. The arrow-of-plague iconography spread broadly in Eastern Mediterranean religion: it appears in the Apollo Smintheus (the plague-shooting Apollo at Troy in Iliad I), in the Levantine god Resheph, and in various Mesopotamian disease-demons. Iyarri stands among the older preserved instances of the type.

Curator’s note

What the sources say, and what later tradition added. The sources for this bay

Iyarri (or Yarri) is known from Hittite-Luwian ritual texts and from treaty-curses of the Empire period. The arrow-of-plague conception — that disease is the discharge of an angry god's quiver — is widespread across the Eastern Mediterranean and survives in Greek tradition (Iliad I) and in Levantine cult; the Anatolian instance shows the type in early form. Modern medical readers have sometimes asked whether the recurring "arrow" image reflects ancient observation of small skin-eruptions or punctate fever-marks; the question is interesting but not really answerable from the literary evidence alone.

Kin in the sources

Each tie is quoted from the entry that states it.

Compared withReshephit appears in the Apollo Smintheus (the plague-shooting Apollo at Troy in Iliad I), in the Levantine god Resheph

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.