A Queen Who Was a Priestess First

Puduhepa held a position of considerable religious authority in her own right before her marriage to Hattusili III, having served as a priestess of the Sun Goddess of Arinna, one of the chief deities of the Hittite state pantheon, and this prior religious training and standing distinguishes her prayer for her husband's health and long life from a purely conventional royal petition, since Puduhepa approached the goddess she addressed with an established personal and professional religious relationship rather than only the general access any Hittite monarch might claim through royal office alone.

As one of the relatively few surviving ancient Near Eastern prayers composed by and attributed to a specific named woman rather than an anonymous or male royal voice, Puduhepa's prayer offers historians of the ancient Near East and of women's religious history unusually direct evidence of a queen's personal religious role and voice within Hittite state religion, evidence considerably rarer than the comparatively more numerous surviving prayers attributed to male Hittite kings such as Mursili II, discussed elsewhere in this atlas.

Hittite state correspondence recovered at Hattusa preserves several letters exchanged directly between Puduhepa and Ramesses II, including diplomatic communication surrounding the marriage of a Hittite princess to the Egyptian pharaoh, giving historians rare direct textual evidence of an ancient Near Eastern queen conducting international diplomacy in her own documented voice.