---
title: "How the Hittites Cleansed a Beaten Army: Halved Victims, Fire and the River"
description: "Ten clay fragments from Hattusa describe rites for defeated soldiers, offerings to enemy gods and a king’s cleansing by the sea"
author: "Jan Sokol"
published: 2026-11-06T21:56:05Z
modified: 2026-11-07T08:56:39Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/how-the-hittites-cleansed-a-beaten-army-halved-victims-fire--6e131d
language: en
tags: ["history", "archaeology", "ritual", "hittites", "warfare", "world"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# How the Hittites Cleansed a Beaten Army: Halved Victims, Fire and the River

*Ten clay fragments from Hattusa describe rites for defeated soldiers, offerings to enemy gods and a king’s cleansing by the sea*

By Jan Sokol · November 6, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/how-the-hittites-cleansed-a-beaten-army-halved-victims-fire--6e131d

## In brief

- A 2026 Colloquium Anatolicum study by Meltem Doğan-Alparslan examines ten cuneiform fragments from Boğazköy/Hattusa
- Tablet KUB 17.28 describes splitting a human, he-goat, puppy and piglet in two so defeated troops could pass between them
- Petra Goedegebuure suggests the human victim was likely a prisoner of war, though the text does not say so
- Fragment Bo 7381 concerns offerings and appeals to the gods of the enemy Kaska land at its borders
- Fragment Bo 7485 belongs to the ‘Sea Ritual’, in which the king purified himself on the shore after a campaign

A defeated army comes home carrying more than its wounded. In second-millennium BCE Anatolia, where the Hittite kings held much of the peninsula from their capital at Hattusa, the soldiers who survived a lost battle were thought to bring something else back with them. It could not be seen or counted in a muster roll. It was misfortune, a ritual stain, and it clung to the troops as surely as the dust of the road.

The kingdom had a procedure for it. Like any state, it had a procedure for most things.

That procedure, and two others like it, is the subject of a 2026 study in the journal [*Colloquium Anatolicum*](https://dergipark.org.tr/en/pub/collan) by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Meltem Doğan-Alparslan of Istanbul University, who examined ten cuneiform tablet fragments from Boğazköy, the modern village above the ruins of Hattusa. Her findings were [described by Oguz Buyukyildirim for *Arkeonews*](https://arkeonews.net/human-sacrifice-and-the-rituals-of-hittite-warfare/). The fragments cover rites for armies that had lost, offerings to the gods of hostile lands, and a ceremony the king performed on the seashore after coming home from a campaign.

## Between the halves

The Hittites did not read the result of a war only from the size of the armies or the skill of the generals. Victory and defeat also showed whether the gods were pleased or angry. A beaten army therefore could not simply be regrouped and sent back out. First the religious order had to be put right.

![Five bowed warriors carrying round shields approach a thorn-covered arch flanked by flaming bowls beside a winding river in a mountainous landscape.](https://rews.cc/img/7ea5237a3054f91d3ee6e365fba728068629063b.webp)

One of the fragments, Bo 7425, is small and written in a hand with Middle Hittite features. It belongs to the text group catalogued as CTH 426, which holds rituals for armies defeated in war. On its own it preserves too little to reconstruct the rite. But another tablet from the same tradition, KUB 17.28, which was already known, sets out the ceremony in lines 45 to 56 of its fourth column.

A human being, a he-goat, a puppy and a piglet are split in two. The halves are laid out facing one another, leaving a space for the soldiers to walk through. A passage is built from thorny branches and fires are lit on either side. The troops go through the fire and the thorns. At a riverbank they are sprinkled with water. A further sacrifice in an open field ends the rite.

In this order, fire and water and the divided bodies stop being ordinary things. Each stage is meant to strip misfortune from the men. Walking from one side to the other is read as a symbolic passage from a polluted state to a clean one.

One reflection is allowed here, and it is only a reflection. Defeat is the moment when a state’s claim to order is weakest, and this rite turns that moment into ceremony. The army is not told it lost through bad planning. It is told it has been made unclean, and the cure is in the hands of the priests and the crown.

## Who was cut in two

The person at the centre of the rite has no name. KUB 17.28 says plainly that a human was split in two along with the animals. It says nothing about who that person was, what their status was, or how they were chosen.

![A sepia-toned illustration shows a robed human figure carved into a broken stone slab, split by a deep crack and surrounded by scattered fragments.](https://rews.cc/img/8914291f92957dd0eb1802293deb189a73c3a568.webp)

Petra Goedegebuure, a Hittitologist at the University of Chicago, thinks the victim was probably a prisoner of war. She bases this on other Hittite military rituals in which prisoners appear next to sacrifices. An [older newsletter from Chicago’s Oriental Institute on the puppy in Hittite ritual](https://isac.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/uploads/shared/docs/nn136.pdf) also took the victim to be a prisoner. KUB 17.28 itself does not say so.

The distinction matters. The text shows that human sacrifice could belong to the Hittite tradition of military purification. It does not show how often the rite was carried out, or after which battles. A ritual prescription is not a record of a specific day after a specific war, and the two should not be confused. All that survives of the victim is a single line of instruction.

## Gifts for the enemy’s gods

Not all of these rites followed a defeat. When the army crossed into hostile country it entered the territory of other gods, and those gods had to be dealt with too. Fragment Bo 7381 belongs to the CTH 422 group, rituals performed at the borders of enemy lands. In them, offerings and appeals were made to the gods of the Kaska land, a people the Hittites fought for a long time.

So the war with the Kaska was fought on two fronts, one of them diplomatic, with the enemy’s own heaven. Foreign gods were not ignored. They could be approached through ritual, and perhaps persuaded. Hittite religion drew on more than one source, and Doğan-Alparslan’s study traces how Hurrian traditions, and above all those of Kizzuwatna, show up in the tablets from Hattusa.

![A robed figure offers a bowl of grain toward a giant open hand above rocky terrain, with green forests and mountains in the distance.](https://rews.cc/img/a879da5f0f6407aeb3bb75ce131d17ce5501bb5a.webp)

## The sea, far from the capital

The third rite is the strangest, because of where it was performed. Fragment Bo 7485 belongs to CTH 436, the group known as the “Sea Ritual.” Here the king, back from a campaign in enemy country, performs a purification on the seashore to wash off any impurity he and his army might have picked up. The rite also served to reaffirm, in religious terms, that the kingdom’s borders were secure.

Yet Hattusa lay in the interior of Anatolia, a long way from any coast. As Hittite power spread over time toward the coastal regions of the peninsula, the sea entered the kingdom’s political and cultural life. A 2022 study by Sevgül Çilingir Cesur and Michele Cammarosano found that in the Hittite world the sea was more than a stretch of geography or a shipping route. It carried weight in religion, myth and ritual. A king from the dry uplands who went to the shore to be cleansed fits into that wider sacred geography.

The three rites are not stages of one campaign. They come from different tablet groups and were meant for different situations. The study argues that, taken together, they show the Hittites never treated the outcome of a war as a purely military or political matter. Earlier tablets from Hattusa have recorded [an epidemic and the death of an infant princess](https://rews.cc/a/hittite-tablets-found-in-turkiye-record-epidemic-and-an-infa-e2de35), always with the gods close by.

Whether the fires and the river also gave the survivors some kind of peace after the killing, the tablets do not say. What they preserve are instructions: what to cut, where to lay the pieces, which way the soldiers should walk. How the men felt as they went between the halves was never written down.