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the epic of kumarbi and the theogony of hesiod

This text is noteworthy for the story it tells and because it is 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.


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.

source - The Journal of Hellenic Studies - Kumbari - Cambridge