that a reference to him might already occur in a building inscription of Tiš-atal, a local ruler of this city during the times of either the Akkadian Empire or the Third Dynasty of Ur: The deity presumed to be Kumarbi by a number of authors is designated in this context by the sumerogram dKIŠ.GAL, normally used to refer to Nergal. Alfonso Archi agrees that the logogram might designate a Hurrian deity, though he instead proposes Aštabi, and based on other Hurrian evidence notes that the possibility that Nergal was meant cannot be ruled out. Doubts have also been expressed by , who states that while not entirely implausible, the proposal that Kumarbi is represented by a sumerogram in the inscription is impossible to prove. Beate Pongratz-Leisten tentatively refers to both Nergal and Kumarbi as possible identities of the deity of Urkesh. A temple found during excavations of Urkesh which remained in use from the third millennium BCE to the end of the Mitanni empire has been interpreted as possibly dedicated to Kumarbi. The apu, a type of offering pit, from the same site might have also been linked to him. A unique seal from Urkesh depicting a deity striding over a mountain range has also been described as a possible depiction of Kumarbi. It has been noted that it finds no close parallels among similar works of art known from southern Mesopotamia. Early attestations of Kumarbi are also present in sources from Mari. Gernot Wilhelm argues that the oldest certain reference to him occurs in a tablet from this city inscribed with a Hurrian text, dated to roughly 1700 BCE. In an incantation, he is mentioned alongside Pidenḫi, an epithet of Shalash: It has been suggested that it was meant to cure toothache. However, it is not certain why Kumarbi and Shalash would be invoked in connection with teeth. A further city in modern Syria from which evidence for the worship of Kumarbi is available is Ugarit. Hurrian offering lists from this city place him after a “god father” (a “generic ancestor of the gods”) and El (otherwise absent from Hurrian tradition). This sequence corresponds to the enumeration of Ilib, El and Dagan in similar texts written in Ugaritic or Akkadian. In KTU3 1.110, a description of a type of sacrifice (aṯḫulumma), Kumarbi instead appears after Kušuḫ. A Hurrian incantation, KTU3 1.44 (RS 1.007), mentions that he was worshiped “from