Humban
He is already attested in the earliest sources preserving information about Elamite religion, but seemingly only grew in importance in the neo-Elamite period, in which many kings had theophoric names invoking him.
Due to his role in religion of the neo-Elamite person, he was also worshiped by the earliest Persian rulers from the Achaemenid dynasty, as indicated by the Persepolis Administrative Archives, where he is mentioned more often even than Ahura Mazda.
[5] Other gods were believed to bestow it too, for example Inshushinak,[9] Tepti and Tirutur, but the kitin of Humban was regarded as the most important for the kings in the Neo-Elamite period.
[7] Similarly, the term kitin is largely limited to administrative texts in earlier periods, and only starts to appear in royal inscriptions in Neo-Elamite times.
[10] Oldest attestation of Humban is the Treaty of Naram-Sin of Akkad, whose signatories were the Akkadian ruler in mention (reigned 2260-2223 BCE) and an unknown Elamite monarch, often assumed to be Khita of Awan, though definite evidence is lacking.
[11] The other divine witnesses enumerated include deities of both Elamite (for example Simut and Hutran) and western (Ilaba, Ishara, Manzat, Ninkarrak, Ninurta) origin.
[3] In the Middle Elamite period (second half of the second millennium BCE), king Untash-Napirisha built a temple of Humban at Chogha Zanbil.
[3] Humban also appears in the inscription from a stele of king Shilhak-Inshushinak I, in which he occupies the fourth place among the gods listed, after Napirisha, Kiririsha and Inshushinak.
[27] Mary Boyce went as far as suggesting that the prominence of Humban in the Neo-Elamite period influenced the position of Ahura Mazda in later religious traditions of the Persians, but Henkelman considers this proposal to be entirely speculative.
[5] It is nonetheless plausible that the concept of kitin, associated with the Neo-Elamite period with Humban, was later assigned to Ahura Mazda, as indicated by an inscription of Xerxes using this term.
[7] This equation was most likely based on their shared role as sources of royal power in the respective cultures, as no evidence in favor or against attributing any other functions of Enlil (such as determination of fates or control over weather) to Humban is available.
[35] Alexandre Lokotionov notes that this sequence of gods mirrors the reference to Humban in Šurpu, and that its inclusion possibly indicates that to the Assyrians the underworld "could have simply been a repository for the exotic and the unusual.
"[35] Ammankasibar, a god whose statue according to the annals of Ashurbanipal was taken to Assyria, has been identified with Humban by some researchers, but there is no plausible explanation for the element kasibar in his name.
[37] While in past scholarship it has been assumed that Humban might have been the model for Humbaba, the guardian of the Cedar Forest in the Epic of Gilgamesh, this theory is no longer considered plausible today according to Andrew R. George, who notes that it relied on "unsafe historical conclusions".
[45] Maria Brosius also evaluates Dalley's hypothesis that characters in the Book of Esther are derived from specific deities critically, and points out it does not represent academic consensus.
