How a humble noise-making instrument may connect Hattian metalworkers, Hurrian myth-singers, Egyptian priestesses of Isis, and the bronze-working culture of the Kingdom of Van
The sistrum (Greek σεῖστρον, Latin sistrum) is best known today as an Egyptian instrument: a metal loop-frame rattle, often topped by the face of the goddess Hathor, shaken by priestesses in the cult of Isis to produce a sharp, jingling noise. Plutarch, writing in the early second century CE, gave the instrument a cosmological meaning in his essay On Isis and Osiris. He explained that the sistrum shows that “all things in existence need to be shaken… and never to cease from motion,” and that its rattling was specifically used to “avert and repel Typhon” — the god of chaos and destruction — because motion and noise were what kept a decaying, “drowsy” nature awake and alive (Plutarch, Moralia, “On Isis and Osiris,” §63; full Greek text with commentary at Thrice-Greatest Hermes, vol. 1; Loeb translation at Penelope/UChicago).
That single idea — noise as a weapon against chaos, decay, and divine sleep — turns out to be far older than Egypt’s Isis cult, and far more widely distributed across the ancient Near East than the elegant Hathor-headed sistra of the Ptolemaic and Roman periods suggest. Frame rattles of the same basic type — an arched or looped frame strung with metal rods or disks that clatter when shaken — are attested by around 2500 BCE in Sumer, and matching open-topped, U-shaped rattles have been excavated in the southern Caucasus, near Tbilisi (Britannica, “sistrum”). This already tells us that the sistrum-type rattle was never an exclusively Egyptian invention; it was a Near Eastern ritual technology that different cultures adapted to their own gods and ceremonies, from Sumer to Anatolia to Egypt to, eventually, Rome.
This article follows that thread north and east, into Bronze and Iron Age Anatolia and the Armenian Highlands, where a strikingly similar object — and a strikingly similar idea about what noise does for the gods — appears in the archaeological and textual record centuries before Plutarch ever picked up a pen.
Long before the Hittite state existed, Central Anatolia was home to the Hattians, whose material culture is known above all from Early Bronze Age cemeteries such as Alaca Höyük and Horoztepe, near modern Tokat. Horoztepe is famous for its rich “princely” tombs containing bronze standards, animal figurines, and — critically for this discussion — bronze rattles of unmistakably sistrum-like form.
One of these objects, a copper-alloy rattle dated to roughly 2300–2000 BCE, is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, catalogued simply as “Sistrum (rattle),” Hattian culture, Early Bronze Age III, from Central Anatolia (accession no. 55.137.2). The Met’s own catalogue entry uses the word sistrum for the object without qualification: metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/324441. A closely related piece from the same site, decorated with stylized animal and bird motifs typical of Horoztepe bronzework, is also in the Met’s collection: metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/324440 (see also the Google Arts & Culture record).
These Horoztepe rattles predate the classic Egyptian temple sistrum by well over a millennium and predate the centralized Hittite Empire itself. In other words: the “sistrum” as a physical object was already being cast in bronze on the Anatolian plateau in the third millennium BCE, as part of the funerary and votive equipment of a pre-Hittite, indigenous Anatolian culture — long before the word seistron was coined in Greek and long before the instrument became emblematic of the cult of Isis.
If the object existed early, so did the vocabulary for it. Hittite ritual texts — many of them translations or adaptations of older Hattian and Hurrian material — use the Sumerogram GIŠmukar (also transliterated mukn-) as the standard term for “rattle” in cultic contexts, distinct from drums (GIŠBALAG.DI / arkammi-), lyres, and cymbals. This is documented in specialist inventories of Hittite musical and cultic terminology drawn from the cuneiform corpus; see the compiled instrument glossary at wrdingham.co.uk, “Hittite musical instruments, performers and verbs”, and general discussion of Hittite ritual percussion (drums, cymbals, rattles) in Sacred Ritual Instruments — Hittite Ritual Instruments.
It is worth being precise about what is and is not established here. Philologically, mukar is simply the Hittite cuneiform word for a rattle-type idiophone used in temple ritual; it is not itself linguistically identical to the Greek seistron, and no ancient source explicitly equates the two. What can be said on solid ground is this: the two cultures — Hattian/Hittite Anatolia and Pharaonic Egypt — independently possessed the same category of instrument (a metal-jingling frame rattle) and used it for structurally the same purpose: apotropaic, state and temple ritual, meant to affect the behavior of a deity or a hostile cosmic force. Whether mukar and seistron share a deeper prehistoric or diffusional connection is a question for comparative Near Eastern musicology rather than a settled fact, and readers should treat any stronger claim of direct linguistic descent with caution.
The ritual use of rattles, cymbals, and song in Hurro-Hittite religion is not only archaeological — it is also embedded in mythology. In the Kumarbi Cycle, the “Song of Hedammu” tells how the sea-monster Hedammu threatens to devour humanity and starve the gods of their offerings. It is the goddess Šauška (Hurrian Šauška/Anzili, identified with Mesopotamian Ishtar/Inanna) who saves the situation — not by force, but by seduction: she goes down to the shore adorned and singing, and in the closely parallel “Song of Ullikummi” the same goddess is explicitly described using percussion, singing and playing a lyre and striking cymbals to draw the monster’s attention (see The Ancient Hurrian Myth That Inspired the Greek Gods, TheCollector; on Hedammu specifically, World History Encyclopedia, “Sauska”; Wikipedia, “Ḫedammu”; and the technical philological study by M. Dijkstra, “Ishtar Seduces the Sea-Serpent,” Ugarit-Forschungen 43 (2011)).
Here, sound-making instruments are not decorative — they are the divine weapon itself, the tool by which a goddess masters chaos. The thematic parallel with Plutarch’s much later explanation of the Egyptian sistrum — an instrument that “shakes” a torpid, chaos-threatened nature back into order, and specifically repels the destructive god Typhon — is striking. Two very different pantheons, separated by more than a thousand years, assign the same ritual logic to a rattling bronze instrument: noise disciplines chaos.
This logic extends beyond myth into the actual liturgical practice recorded in the Hittite archives. Hittite religion was preoccupied with the problem of absent or “sleeping” gods — deities who withdrew their favor, vanished in anger, or simply could not be reached, leaving the land infertile and the community in crisis. The best-known example is the “disappearing god” myth of Telipinu, whose rage causes crops to wither and animals to stop breeding until he is coaxed back by ritual means, in that particular story by the sting of a bee sent by the goddess Ḫannaḫanna (Wikipedia, “Ḫannaḫanna”; World History Edu, “Most Famous Deities in Hittite Mythology”).
The formal ritual genre built around this problem is known in Hittitology as mugawar — literally an “evocation” or “enticement” ritual, aimed at summoning a reluctant or hidden deity (often a Storm-god hypostasis) back to where the community needs him. A recent philological study of one such fragment situates it precisely “among the fragments of mugawar rites for the Storm-god” (J. Miller, “A Hittite Magical Ritual to Be Performed in an Emergency,” ResearchGate). Scholars of Hittite religion note more broadly that “elaborate rituals might be necessary to entice [a deity] to the place where his or her services were required,” with specialist ritualists — in effect professional divine summoners — employed for exactly this task (T. Bryce, Life and Society in the Hittite World, full text, University of Pennsylvania).
It is in exactly this kind of ceremony — designed to rouse, alert, and physically summon a divine presence — that a hand-shaken metal rattle like the Horoztepe mukar/sistrum finds its most natural function. This is speculative bridge-building rather than a documented one-to-one link (no surviving tablet explicitly says “shake the mukar to wake the Storm-god”), but the functional logic is continuous: an instrument built specifically to make a sharp, attention-getting noise, in a religious culture explicitly organized around the problem of divine absence and the need to summon or reawaken the gods.
Urartu, the Iron Age kingdom centered on Lake Van (roughly ninth to sixth centuries BCE), arose in Armenian Highlands after the collapse of the Hittite state around 1200 BCE, alongside other successor polities such as Phrygia, Tabal, and Lydia. The Metropolitan Museum’s overview of Urartian material culture notes that “from early in the kingdom’s history, very characteristic artifacts were manufactured, including hundreds of bronze belts along with shields, quivers, helmets, bells, horse equipment, jewelry, and ceramic and metal vessels of many forms,” typically decorated with deities, composite creatures, royal rituals, hunts, and battle scenes (Met, “Urartu,” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History). Surviving Urartian bronze belts, such as the example catalogued at the Met (Belt fragment, Urartian, Iron Age III), and belt fragments showing deities, bulls, and lions, demonstrate the same repoussé, sheet-bronze metalworking tradition — figural relief hammered into thin metal — visible in the plaques and mirror-work associated with Urartian and neighboring Iron Age Near Eastern elite culture more broadly.
This is the deeper continuity worth underlining: Urartu inherited, both geographically and technologically, the bronze-casting and sheet-metal repoussé tradition of Anatolia — the very tradition that produced the Horoztepe rattles. Urartian metalworkers cast bells as standard equipment (on horse harness, belts, and temple furnishings) precisely for the same acoustic-apotropaic function attested for Hattian and Hittite rattles centuries earlier: sound as a protective, order-maintaining device attached to the body, the horse, or the god’s threshold. Whether any specific surviving Urartian object should be called a “sistrum” in the strict Egyptian sense is a separate, narrower question that would require direct typological comparison of individual excavated pieces — a task for site reports from Karmir Blur, Erebuni, Altıntepe, and Toprakkale rather than for a general essay. What the evidence does support is the broader claim: that Urartu’s bronze ritual culture — its belts, bells, and cast metal furnishings — sits squarely within the same Anatolian and Transcaucasian tradition of acoustic, apotropaic bronze-work that produced the third-millennium-BCE Hattian rattles and, later, fed indirectly (via Sumer, via Anatolia, via the wider Near East) into the family of instruments the Greeks eventually generalized under the name seistron.
Strip away the specific gods — Typhon, Hedammu, Telipinu — and a single idea persists across three thousand years of Near Eastern religion: a torpid or hostile cosmos needs to be shaken awake, and bronze rattles, bells, and clappers were the technology built to do it. Egypt gave that idea its most famous material form, the Hathor-headed sistrum of the Isis cult, described by Plutarch as a device for repelling chaos itself. But the underlying object — a metal-strung frame rattle — and the underlying religious logic — noise as a tool against divine sleep, decay, and hostile monsters — are demonstrably older, attested in Sumer by 2500 BCE and cast in bronze by Hattian smiths at Horoztepe by 2300 BCE, embedded in Hurro-Hittite myth in the songs of Šauška, and formalized in the mugawar rites meant to summon absent gods. Urartu, rising directly out of the ruins of the Hittite world in the same mountainous heartland, inherited that same bronze-casting tradition and the same instinct to arm bells, belts, and ritual furnishings with sound. The precise line from Hattian mukar to Urartian bronze bell to Egyptian seistron to the later Armenian folk term qshots’ cannot be drawn as a single unbroken chain on current evidence — but the family resemblance, in object, sound, and purpose, is real, well documented, and worth taking seriously as a subject for further comparative research.
A note on method: this article deliberately separates well-documented facts (the Horoztepe rattles, Plutarch’s text, the Hittite word mukar, Urartu’s bronze-belt tradition) from more speculative connective claims (that these traditions form one continuous lineage). Readers using this piece as a source for further publication should preserve that distinction.
Based on the publication: Сукиас Торосян
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