Šanta

Šanta (Santa) was a god worshiped in Bronze Age Anatolia by Luwians and Hittites. It is presumed that he was regarded as a warlike deity, and that he could additionally be associated with plagues and possibly with the underworld, though the latter proposal is not universally accepted. In known texts he frequently appears alongside Iyarri, a deity of similar character. He is first attested in documents from Kanesh dated to the Old Assyrian period, and continues to appear in later treaties, ritual texts and theophoric names. He is also present in an offering lists from Emar written in Akkadian, though he did not belong to the local pantheon and rituals involving him were only performed on behalf of the Hittite administration by local inhabitants.

No references to Šanta are known from the centuries immediately following the fall of the Hittite Empire, but later Neo-Assyrian texts record theophoric names invoking which confirm he continued to be worshiped in the first millennium BCE. He is also attested in a number of Hieroglyphic Luwian inscriptions. He was regarded as the tutelary god of the city of Tarsus, and possibly as its mythical founder. He was also venerated further west, in Lydia. He is also attested in a variety of Greco-Roman sources, in which he was referred to as Sandas, Sandes or Sandon. In the process of interpretatio graeca he came to be regarded as the equivalent of Heracles, but there is no evidence that the two ever fully merged. A distinct tradition, possibly originating in Tarsus, presented him as one of the Titans instead.

In addition to certain attestations of Šanta, a number of similar theonyms and figures associated with Tarsus are sometimes argued to correspond to him, including the Aramaic deity Ba’altars, "Baal of Tarsus", as well as Zas, Zantas and Sandakos from Greco-Roman sources.