The Founders Week

So I decided to go more anatolian in region for this one, but with a deity slant again this time around, creating a look for Mito Uzumaki based off the deity Hatepuna. Hatepuna was known as the daughter of the sea, and was often considered the wife of one of two deities mainly; Telipinu, and Halki.

Telipinu is an agricultural, deity, and I'd argue also a storm deity, who was son to the big storm god in charge, Tarhunt. Telipinu has some pretty funny stories associated with him actually, including the one which explains how he met and married Hatepuna. I won't go into them too much here though; I'd recommend Harry Hoffner's Hittite Myths, second edition if you're interested those tales.

Halki is another agricultural deity, but is a funny case where they are both considered to be a man and a women depending on when and where you are in their career - however, whenever they're married to Hatepuna, they're assumed to be a man.

I thought it would be fun to come up with some designs for Hashirama and Toka as well based on those two, for the wall art behind Mito here, so that's what I ended up doing.

For clothing inspiration, I took some cues from the Yazılıkaya Hittite Rock Sanctuary. Here are some diagrams:

(Figure Image Source)

I went with an outfit for Mito based on the clothing of the women in these processions here. There's a level of interpretation here from me; I went with a flowing dress, puffed sleeves, and a tall cylindrical hat with a veil piece to it.

There's a similarly shaped hat I kind of like from a relief that's from Carchemish of the deity Kubaba actually:

(Image Source)

Anyway, while I went with a stylized version of the uzumaki swirl for some of the decoration to Mito's outfit, I also used a hittite stamp seal for further decoration on her hat piece.

As to the seals she's wearing in her hair, I thought it would be fun to go with some hittite cuneiform, so that's what I did.

I decided to go with the with the word "huwanhuessar" which seems to translate to water related words like "wave" or "flood" here.

This alliteration was broken down further into "hu-wa-an-hu-es-sar" which helped me pick out the cuneiform needed.

(Source: Hittite Historical Phonology by Sarah E. Kimball)

The cuneiform I used was from a downloadable document from this unicode cuneiform font resource I found.

I cannot say for sure if I got the characters right! But hey, at least I tried, lmaooo.

I kept her necklace looking the same as the one in the series though, since it's important - the one Tsunade inherits, and later gives to Naruto of course.

As for Hashirama and Toka, I also took design cues from the same Yazılıkaya carvings - I thought it might be interesting to take some cues from Sauska, a hurrian deity as well for Toka. If you look closely at the reliefs, Sauska is depicted twice in both the men's and women's processions, in distinctly different clothing. I thought it would be interesting to take the cues from her clothing in the masculine lineup, considering my thought process going off of just Halki alone at the start of all this.

It's not unusual to see a goddess also wearing that kind of conical headwear in general. Here's another one from a stag shaped vessel in the met museum's collection:

(Image Source)

The deity in the tall hat you see here is also meant to be a goddess.

I had no idea how to incorporate Toka's hairstyle given the headwear involved, so I went with a modified hathoric curl braid you see a lot of deities have, and added the ribbon ties she normally has to it.

Those kinds of curling hair styles were popular in the ancient near east in general - a paper on that if you're into that sort of thing.

For Hashirama, I also looked at some designs from these little deity amulets I found, particularly for his big headwear:

Sources: British Museum Amulet | Louvre Museum Amulet

The way the crowns are etched kind of look like trees or plant growth, so I thought I'd incorporate that a bit into Hashirama's own design here. Although I'm not sure how well that comes across with the side view, but I committed to it, so hey. I also included the design from another hittite seal into his clothing, although you might not be able to see it unless you zoom in, lol:

(Image Source)

I did take a few cues as well from this relief of Tarhunza and the vines in Ivriz, even though that's decidedly more neo hittite, lmao. I just liked the idea of depicting him holding a vine bearing fruit like you see there, so I went with it.