Healing

Illness in the Hittite kingdom called on physicians, ritual specialists and the religious responsibilities of rulers. Texts from the Late Bronze Age describe treatment with materials and spoken procedures, investigations into divine anger and appeals for relief during an epidemic. These practices belonged to the same world of care, in which physical distress and the relationship with the gods could be addressed together.

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Divine expertise and human practice

Kamrušepa is the clearest named healing deity in the accounts considered here. Hittite and Luwian traditions associated her with both medicine and magic, and she could act as a divine midwife. Explanations attached to ritual texts presented her as the inventor of procedures that were later transmitted to people. In this way, human ritual practice could be understood as drawing on knowledge established by a deity.

Hittite rituals could associate Kamrušepa with other gods, including Pirwa, Maliya, and the Hurrian goddess Šauška. In bilingual Hittite and Hattic texts, she corresponds with the Hattic and Palaic goddess Kataḫzipuri. Some Luwian traditions also linked her with the Mesopotamian healing goddess Gula. These connections show that healing deities and ritual traditions could be expressed through different regional and linguistic traditions and the adaptation of inherited names.

Human specialists carried out the work. Physicians, named in texts with the written title A.ZU, could work alongside ritual practitioners. Women bearing the conventional title “Old Woman” performed purification, treated affliction and conducted oracles. The title identifies a recognised kind of specialist in the records, with procedures attributed to named women such as Tunnawi.

Care, materials and professional services

The laws recognise a physician’s paid service in the care of an injured person. An assailant who made someone unable to work had to maintain the patient, provide another worker during recovery and pay the doctor’s fee. Treatment therefore had an economic setting: injury interrupted the household’s work as well as harming the individual.

Medical texts preserved at Hattusa include Akkadian prescriptions for inflamed eyes. Such tablets connected the Hittite court’s collections with the wider healing literature of Mesopotamia. The medical and ritual corpus used plant, mineral and animal materials, sometimes in combinations requiring preparation and application.

Materials could also become offerings within a healing procedure. In the ritual attributed to Ammihatna, honey, oil, figs, raisins and olives were placed in a vessel on a sacrificial table to appease angry gods. Here the ingredients supplied an act directed towards divine anger, while other procedures involved direct actions on the patient.

Ritual actions and restoration

A ritual attributed to Tunnawi describes a client seeking release from impurity and affliction. The practitioner gathers materials by a river, invokes divine help and performs actions with objects made from riverbank clay. Passing objects over the client, washing and prescribed speech give the unwanted condition a route away from the person. The procedure explains recovery through removal and transfer as well as through an appeal to a deity.

Healing texts also use plants and other substances in treatments. The Berlin research project Materia Magica et Medica Hethitica studies these materials together with the rituals in which they occur. Preparing and applying a substance could be one stage in a sequence that also required an invocation, a transfer of impurity or a final act of purification.

Epidemic disease and royal prayer

The epidemic often called the Hittite plague struck in the mid-to-late fourteenth century BCE. Its precise cause is unknown. Hittite texts associate the crisis with the deaths of Šuppiluliuma I and his successor Arnuwanda II. Mursili II, who succeeded them, composed prayers seeking relief from an epidemic said to have lasted about twenty years and caused many deaths.

Mursili attributed the epidemic’s arrival to Egyptian prisoners brought into Hittite territory. He then sought the source of divine anger through oracle inquiries, recalling earlier offences and neglected obligations. His prayers admit inherited royal responsibility and ask the gods to accept the remedy. The account records a king’s religious explanation of the crisis and the action he believed would end it.

A royal affliction and oracle inquiry

A more personal text records Mursili’s speech difficulty after a frightening thunderstorm. Later dreams led him to an oracle inquiry that identified the Storm God of Manuzziya as the deity requiring attention. An ox was selected as a substitute for the king and sent towards the deity’s region in Kizzuwatna. The ritual addressed the unresolved encounter by giving the god another recipient for the action directed at the ruler.

For the wider setting, see Hittite daily life.