reddish beard that seems to be a distinguishing feature of the Indo-European
thunder-god (Perkunas, Perun, Indra, Thor).^33
Tarh
̆unnaOne of the principal deities in the Anatolian pantheon was the storm-god
whose Hittite name was Tarh
̆
unna or Tarh
̆unta (Luwian Tarh
̆unza, Palaic
Taru). The root here is the verb tarh
̆
- ‘overcome, vanquish’, but the formation
with *-u-no- is curiously parallel to that of Perkunas and Perun.^34
The attested mythology of Tarh
̆
unna contained in the so-called Kumarbi
cycle is largely taken over from the Hurrian storm-god Tesˇsˇub and does not
reflect Indo-European myth. There is, however, one detail in the story of his
birth that deserves notice. He is confined in Kumarbi’s belly with two other
gods, having grown there after Kumarbi swallowed the seed of Anu, that is, of
the personified Heaven. There is discussion in the fragmentary text of how
they might come out. One of the alternatives is ‘the good place’, which seems to
be neither the mouth nor the skull, and it is by this route that the Storm-god
is born. It involves a rupture of Kumarbi’s body, which has to be stitched up.
There is an intriguing parallel in a dialogue hymn of the Rigveda which
begins with the unborn Indra inside his mother (unnamed). She has held him
there for a thousand months. She, or someone, calls for him to be born in the
traditional, tried and tested way by which all gods have been born. But he
declares, ‘I will not go out this way, it is bad going (durgáha ̄) thus. Sideways
from her ribs I will go out.’ And so he does, without explaining why he
regards this as a superior place of exit. Macdonell suggested that ‘this trait
may possibly be derived from the notion of lightning breaking from the side
of the storm-cloud’.^35 That seems plausible enough, and if the Indo-European
storm-god was said for this reason to have been born from his mother’s side,
designated as ‘the good place’, the motif might have been imported into the
Hittite version of the Hurrian narrative.
Zeus, Jupiter, HeraclesI have suggested that Zeus, the original sky-god, took over the tempestuous
functions of the more dedicated Keraunos. According to Hesiod (Th. 140 f.,
(^33) Movses XorenacUi 1. 31; Zaehner (as n. 32); J. R. Russell, Zoroastrianism in Armenia
(Cambridge, Mass. 1987), 204 f.; Ishkol-Kerovpian (1986), 151.
(^34) Cf. Watkins in Mayrhofer et al. (1974), 107; id. (1995), 343 f.; Bader (1989), 93 f.; Nagy
(1990), 189 f.
(^35) CTH 344 A ii, translated in Hoffner (1998), 43 f.; RV 4. 18. 1 f.; Macdonell (1898), 56.
- Storm and Stream 247