A temple, festivals and clergy dedicated to her are attested in texts from her city, and in contracts she appears alongside the Assyrian god Ashur.
Anna (also transcribed as Annā[1]) was the principal deity of Kanesh,[2] a city which served as the main Assyrian trading colony in Anatolia.
[1][4] Piotr Taracha tentatively suggests that Anna might have belonged to an "early central Anatolian substrate", similarly as a number of other deities known from texts from Kanesh, such as Ḫariḫari, Ḫigiša, Nipaš, Parka, Perwa (Peruwa) and Tuḫtuḫani.
[6] Guido Kryszat notes the name is similar to the Hittite and Palaic word anna, "mother", and Luwian annā, "cleverness" or "experience".
[7] An alternate proposal is that Anna was a male deity, identical with il Kaniš, the "god of Kanesh", and the feminine titles designated his hitherto unidentified spouse.
[13] In one case, Anna is invoked alongside Ashur, the Assyrian king and rabi sikkatim (presumed to be a local civic authority) in an oath meant to cement the divorce of Pūšu-kēn and Lamassī, both of whom hailed from Assyria.
[14] Klaas R. Veenhof suggests that Anna (who he treats as a male deity) might have been introduced to the pantheon of Assur at some point, as theophoric names with this theonym occur in texts from this site.
[2] Piotr Taracha notes that it might be related to the spread of veneration of weather gods across upper Mesopotamia and Syria in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries BCE.
[19] He compares the new structure of the pantheon of Kanesh to that known from early sources from Hattusa, where the local goddess Inar according to him possibly initially had a similar role as Anna in her city,[20] which later also came to be associated with a weather god.
[21] He also remarks that in Hittite times the position of city deities in Anatolia was consistently secondary compared to the heads of the pantheon, namely the sun goddess and the weather god.