Episode Details

Following in the footsteps of the Hittite emperors and empresses, Decoding Trolls makes a pilgrimage to Mount Ḫazzi on the Syria/Türkiye border. Decoding Trolls narrates his visit to Ḫazzi, or as it is written in the bible Mount Zephon (Saphon in Greek), the most sacred mountain in Hittite religion.

In Hurrian religion (some of which was adopted by the Indo-European Hittites and ancient Greeks) the mountain deities Namni and Ḫazzi served the storm God Teššub (the supreme deity in the Indo-European Hittite pantheon and equivalent to Zeus in the Indo-European Greek religion). Note the Dyeus sound and meaning immanent in the second element of Mount Kassios’s moniker - sios. Mount Kassios is, according to Apollodorus, the equivalent of Mount Ḫazzi in Ancient Greece.

The ‘zzi’ element in Ḫazzi may well also stem from the same Indo-European sound for ‘sky’ and deity we discussed before in the Death episode of the Finding Manuland podcast. For síus was the word and sound for deity in Hittite, the earliest attested Indo-European language, which, like all Indo-European languages, ultimately emanated from Ancient Ukraine, where Dyeus signified ‘Sky’ as in ‘Sky Father’ who would evolve into Iuppiter in Ancient Rome, Dyuh Pater in Ancient India, and of course Zeus Pater in Greece.

Here, is the statue of the storm deity Teššub which I photographed on a recent visit to Karatepe in Cilicia (Türkiye).

The Phoenician script written on this 8th century BCE depiction of Teššub was mirrored in an Indo-European Luwian hieroglyphic inscription found on the same site. This enabled scholars to crack the Luwian hieroglyphic code and in turn to decipher Hittite (an Indo-European language, similar to but distinct from Luwian. Hittite, however, adopted the same system of hieroglyphs from Luwian, which confused scholars quite a bit until they worked this out!).

Hi there, I'm Decoding Trolls. Behind you, Behind me, rather, you will see Mount Zephon, which features in the Bible. It was also, interestingly, most interesting for us, a shrine and a place of pilgrimage for the Hittites and for the Hittite gods. And we're going to head up to this mountain.

I don't know whether we're going to get there because it's very close to the border. It's a couple of kilometers from the border with Syria, and the army may well be there, so may not let us in, but we'll see if we get there.

Okay, so... So as I suspected, I didn't make it all the way up the Holy Mountain at around five kilometers from the summit. There is a checkpoint and some soldiers were there guarding it, which I suppose gives us the idea, the understanding that these places are still very structurally important.

So where I am is at the moment, looking down, you can see through the back behind me is the border with Syria and Turkey. And this is an interaction zone. It has always been an interaction zone between Indo-European and Semitic language speaking cultures. This is basically part of the Amanos Mountains. which divide Turkey from Syria.

And that's what really drew me here because of the MN in Amanos Mountains. And I will, I think, be coming back here quite a lot. Zephon, it's called in the Bible in Hebrew, is Ḫazzi. in Ugaric and for the Hittites. As I was driving along the Mediterranean coast today, I turned a corner and suddenly there was this shadow of the mountain. And so I can relate it to other holy mountains which I've gotten to know since I began Finding Manuland. There's Mount Meru in India, in Northern India, which is the holiest mountain in Hindu and in Buddhism. In Ireland, there's Croagh Patrick and the crew.

And we have Mount Elbrus, which sadly I don't think I'll ever get to visit because it's just over the border in Russia. But Mount Elbrus features a lot in Iranian, early Iranian mythology as the home and the place of the god