In the city of Arinna — somewhere in central Anatolia, never decisively identified by archaeologists — there was worshipped a great Sun Goddess who was the special patroness of the Hittite king and queen, and the principal female deity of the Hittite state. "The Sun-Goddess of Arinna, my lady, mistress of the Hatti lands, queen of heaven and earth, mistress of the kings and queens of Hatti — who hast established their kingship" — so the standard royal prayer addresses her. The Hittite king was "the labarna" of the Sun-Goddess; the Hittite queen, "the tawananna," was her priestess. By the imperial period, the Sun-Goddess of Arinna was systematically identified with Hurrian Hepat — though plainly the two were originally distinct, the one a solar female deity, the other an atmospheric queen of heaven.
Before thisTelepinu
Next on the wallTarhunza
Curator’s note
What the sources say, and what later tradition added. The sources for this bay
The cult of the Sun-Goddess of Arinna was, in Hittite official religion, second only to that of the Storm-God. The royal prayers addressed to her — particularly those of Mursili II in the wake of the great plague of c. 1320 BCE — are among the most personal religious documents of the Hittite corpus. The location of Arinna remains debated; recent scholarship has favored sites near modern Sivas, but the question is open. The goddess is unusual in being a feminine solar deity in a region where the sun is more usually masculine; the Hattic substrate may be relevant.
Kin in the sources
Each tie is quoted from the entry that states it.
Named as the same god asHepatthe Sun-Goddess of Arinna was systematically identified with Hurrian Hepat
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.