Mursili II

Mursili II came to the Hittite throne as a young man after the deaths in rapid succession of his father, Suppiluliuma I, and his elder brother Arnuwanda II, both of whom died within a short span during a plague that had begun ravaging the Hittite kingdom, an inheritance of crisis rather than stability. The plague continued intermittently for roughly twenty years into his own reign, and Mursili, working within a religious framework in which such disasters were understood as divine punishment for some specific unaddressed offense, undertook what modern scholars read as a sustained, almost investigative effort to identify what that offense had been, consulting oracles repeatedly over years rather than settling on an explanation immediately.

The prayers that survive from this process, translated and studied in detail by Itamar Singer among other scholars of Hittite religion, show Mursili working through several possible causes in sequence, including neglected offerings and unfulfilled ritual obligations, before arriving at the explanation he presents as most likely, a serious offense from his father's own reign against oaths that were regarded as bound under divine witness. The prayers combine formal religious petition with what is, in effect, careful historical and legal argument, making them unusually valuable evidence for how Hittite kings understood the relationship between political conduct and divine favor.

In the fullest of the surviving Plague Prayers, Mursili II lays out two specific offenses he identifies as the cause of the plague afflicting his kingdom. The first involves a treaty sworn generations earlier between the Hittites and Egypt, the Kurustama treaty, which Mursili states his father Suppiluliuma I had broken by attacking Egyptian territory after Egypt itself had first approached the Hittites for help following the death of the young pharaoh Tutankhamun, an episode in which an Egyptian queen had requested a Hittite prince in marriage, an offer that ended badly when the prince sent, Zannanza, died before or shortly after reaching Egypt, an event Mursili's prayer treats as having poisoned relations and led to the broken oath. The second offense concerns the killing of Tudhaliya the Younger, a rival claimant to the Hittite throne whom Suppiluliuma had displaced, a killing Mursili frames as a violation of oaths sworn to the gods regardless of its political necessity at the time.

Having identified these causes, Mursili's prayers formally confess them on his father's behalf, since Suppiluliuma himself was already dead and beyond direct punishment, and ask the gods to transfer their anger from the Hittite people generally onto Mursili personally if punishment must continue, a rhetorical structure scholars read as an attempt to close off the disaster by taking formal religious and political responsibility for it in a way the kingdom's institutions could recognize as complete.