Jumalad sõjas: jumalik toetus ja sõdade teoloogiline õigustamine muistses Anatoolias ja Põhja-Süürias

As we can see, divine support, divine intervention, and an ideology of (divine) warfare developed in the Hittite world throughout the whole of Hittite history and became better formulated and more complex with the passing of time, reaching their apex during the New Kingdom Period. If we can observe barely any divine support for Anitta’s deeds in the Text of Anitta, then Ḫattušili I, who ruled 100 years later, already elaborated this phenomenon more explicitly and referred to gods in support of his aggressive politics and military actions (The Annals of Ḫattušili I). The phenomenon of divine support for war can be found in an even more sophisticated and developed manner during the New Kingdom, in the Annals of Tudḫaliya I, in the Manly Deeds of Šuppiluliuma and in the annals written by Muršili II, etc. In some cases, we even have outright theological justification of wars. As we can see, ideology, religion, and theology played an insignificant role in conflict and warfare and especially in the divine support of war in Hittite Anatolia at the time of Anitta in the 18th century BCE. This, however, changed dramatically across the time, and in the Annals of Ḫattušili I, the role of gods increased considerably, and the king began to refer to the gods in justification for his actions (also in war). Later, in the epoch of the New Kingdom, since the time of Tudḫaliya I, and especially since Muršili II, the role of the gods became even more elaborate and sophisticated, and the kings mention several gods or a group of gods, instead of only two or three of them (as was done by Ḫattušili I) which helped them in wars and in military campaigns. We have several pieces of evidence from Hittite sources in which the ruler uses proper theological justification for his military campaign or for the invasion of another country, and the most elaborate of these are the annals of Muršili II. Similar themes of divine support and the occasional theological justification of war are also found in the texts of the vassal kingdoms of the Hittite Empire, with the exception that, on the ideological level, the Hittite kings were the representatives of the gods for the Syrian kings. This is a clear difference between the texts from the core area of the Hittite Empire and the texts from the kingdoms of the Hittite ambit. Many of the wars fought by the major international players of the Late Bronze Age were fought on the battlefields of North Syria, which is why war is a common occurrence in t