Borrowing, Translation, and Syncretism of Deities in Ancient Anatolia

When different cultures come into contact, interactions between the respective religions and cultic practices may also occur, which can result in the attempt to equalize deities belonging to the respective cultural milieus. Taking into account a number of important contributions dealing with contacts between religious systems from a more or less broad perspective, in our paper we will first critically reconsider the classificatory models suggested for the possible types of interaction between deities belonging to different cultures, in order to establish a new and improved classification. Subsequently, we will try to determine which phenomena of interaction involving different deities and panthea were at work in the ancient Anatolian area, providing relevant examples from both the cultures of the Bronze Age and those of the Iron Age.