Plague, pandemics and divine punishment among the hittites

The kingdom of the Hittites was not stranger to calamities. The Hittites conceived pandemics that affected the population from time to time as a punishment inflicted by angry gods. The commitments of the Hittite elite were therefore manyfold: to investigate the reasons of such a punishment, to find a scapegoat or the ultimate cause for it, to appease angry gods, and eventually to resume the previous order. While procedures to gain specific goals are well known to us, thanks to the detailed descriptions of acts and formulae within the technical oracular literature, we know a bit less about the concrete nature of a pandemic, since the Hittites generally defined it as ḫenkan (primarily “death”). In this paper, I briefly present the most revealing occurrences of pandemic into the Hittite sources to disclose the real nature and the causes of the deadly diseases affecting the Hittite population within a precise historical frame.