The Thousand Gods of Hatti

Hittite religion was famously inclusive: the state cult boasted of worshipping "the thousand gods of Hatti," and the boast was close to literal. As the Hittite kingdom expanded across Anatolia and northern Syria it absorbed the gods of the peoples it conquered or encountered, the indigenous Hattian deities, the Hurrian gods who came to dominate the imperial period, and Mesopotamian and other Anatolian figures, and rather than replacing the old gods with new ones it added them, so the pantheon grew by accretion.

The king was the chief priest, responsible for the correct performance of an enormous calendar of festivals (the purulli New Year, the great AN.TAH.SUM spring festival, and many more), and a central Hittite conviction was that the gods must be served exactly and could be reasoned with: the surviving royal prayers argue, plead and even negotiate with the gods over plague and misfortune, treating the divine-human relationship as a kind of contract that both sides were bound to keep.