Sun god of Heaven

deity sky Hittite single tradition · 4

The Sun god of Heaven was worshipped by the Hittites.

↻ synthesized from 4 sources

When

First attested
1800 BCE
Attested period
-1800 – 0
Historical notes
Hittite Bronze Age.

Relationships

syncretized with
Šimige, Shamash

Expand to full subgraph →

Sources

Source passages

“The epithet "of Arinna" only appears during the Hittite Middle Kingdom, to distinguish the Sun goddess from the male Sun god of Heaven, who had been adopted by the Hittites from interaction with the Hurrians.”

#16205 · extracted by google/gemini-2.0-flash-001

“The Sun god of Heaven (Hittite: nepišaš Ištanu) was a Hittite solar deity. He was the second-most worshipped solar deity of the Hittites, after the Sun goddess of Arinna. The Sun god of Heaven was identified with the Hurrian solar deity, Šimige.”

#17337 · extracted by google/gemini-2.0-flash-001

“the Hittite translation refers to Šimige with the epithet nepišaš, 'of heaven,' which finds no parallel in Hurrian tradition, but is well attested as a descriptor of his Hittite counterpart, the Sun god of Heaven.”

#17398 · extracted by anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5

“Šanta appears in an offering list headed by a weather god with the Luwian epithet puttalimmi (possibly "stormy") and the Sun god of Heaven as the recipient of a sacrificial sheep.”

#22757 · extracted by google/gemini-2.0-flash-001