The Prayer of Muwatalli II to the Assembly of the Gods

Before Muwatalli II's prayer ever states what he is asking for, it works methodically through an extended address to the Hittite state pantheon, naming deity after deity in turn, the Storm God of Hatti and the Sun Goddess of Arinna first, followed by a long sequence of other gods and goddesses drawn from across the Hittite empire's many local and regional cults. This structure, sometimes described by scholars of Hittite religion as a divine roll call, reflects a broader Hittite theological assumption running through much of the kingdom's royal prayer literature: that a king's affliction might have its cause anywhere within an enormous and only partly known pantheon, so a prayer seeking relief needed to name and invoke as many relevant deities as possible rather than risk overlooking the one actually responsible or able to help.

That same logic appears in the Hittite plague prayers already catalogued elsewhere in this atlas, where King Mursili II undertakes systematic divination specifically to identify which offence against which god has caused a national disaster, treating the identification itself as necessary work before any petition can succeed. Muwatalli's prayer takes a more exhaustive approach to the same underlying problem, addressing the full assembly directly rather than narrowing the search through prior divination, a difference in method that still serves an identical theological premise, that royal misfortune has a specific, findable divine cause, and identifying or addressing it correctly is what the prayer exists to accomplish.

This heading already catalogues Puduhepa's prayer to the Sun Goddess of Arinna, composed by a Hittite queen on behalf of her husband King Hattusili III's health, addressed to a single named deity in intimate, personal terms. Set beside Muwatalli II's prayer to the full assembly of gods, the pairing shows how differently Hittite royal petition could be pitched depending on circumstance and reign. Puduhepa's prayer, though still a matter of state given the political stakes of a king's health, narrows its address to the one deity most closely tied to the royal house at Arinna, asking with a directness that reads, in translation, as genuinely personal.

Muwatalli's prayer, composed roughly a generation earlier, takes the opposite approach to what appears to be a comparably serious royal affliction, addressing the entire assembled pantheon rather than narrowing the appeal to a single patron. Whether this reflects a difference in the specific crisis each prayer responds to, a difference in royal religious style between the two reigns, or simply the greater length and formality expected of a text meant for wider ritual use, both prayers share the underlying conviction that a king's wellbeing was itself a matter of state religion, requiring the correct divine address, however that address was pitched, to secure the outcome the kingdom needed.