“When the Storm-god thunders": some considerations on Hittite thunder festivals

The Catalogue des Textes Hittites collects under the numbers 630 and 631 several tablets which give evidence of a particular religious praxis: the regular celebration of festivals directly related to the natural phenomenon of thunder. Perceived as a numinous power, the thunder causes in many cultures a religious fear that needs to be exorcized by means of apposite rites. This seems to be particularly true in the Hittite world. Besides many fragments which cannot be placed with certainty due to their fragmentary status, four compositions can be recognized in the corpus: KBo 17.74+ (with its duplicate KBo 17.11+), KBo 17.75, KBo 20.61+ and VSNF 12.10. In CTH 630 are collected the fragments of a peculiar ceremony, product of the superimposition of a thunder festival with the festival of the Moon-god. With the exception of E. Neu’s publication in 1970 of the Old Hittite tablet KBo 17.74+, none of these texts has been properly edited nor has been object of a systematic study. In my paper, which presents some of the results of my PhD dissertation, the corpus of the “thunder festivals” will be analyzed as a whole, in the broader context represented by the Hittite festival calendar. In particular, I will deal with the following problems: what was the purpose of these rites? When where the festivals celebrated? Above all, how can we conciliate the regular celebration of this kind of ceremonies in a particular period of the year, as some sources seem to indicate, with their being connected to an unpredictable event such as the thunder?