Ziparwa was the head of the "extremely heterogenous" pantheon of the
Palaians, speakers of
Palaic, a language closely related to
Hittite and
Luwian. In the
Bronze Age they inhabited
Pala, a northern region of
Anatolia which later came to be known as
Paphlagonia. The original Palaic form of Ziparwa's name, Zaparwa, was spelled in
cuneiform as
dZa-pár-waa(-a)-, while the standard Hittite spelling was
dZi-pár-waa(-a)-. The signs with
subscripts, such as
waa, constituted a Hittite invention, and it is assumed that they reflected "
Hattic syllables beginning with the sound /f/ or /v/". On this basis it is presumed that Ziparwa's name had Hattic roots. It might have originally been pronounced as /Zaparfa/. Hittite scribes apparently considered Ziparwa to belong to the category of
weather gods. It has been proposed that in Palaic context, the
logogram d10, used to designate such deities, can be read as Ziparwa's name, but there is no certain proof in favor of this interpretation. Piotr Taracha has suggested that his name might have originally been an epithet applied to a weather god bearing a Palaic name. This assumption relies on the proposed relation between his name and Taparwašu, a title of the
Hittite storm god. Both might be variants of the same Hattic term in origin. Taracha assumes that under Hattian influence, a Palaic god received a new title, and that his original name was close to Hittite Tarḫunna and Luwian
Tarḫunz. Daniel Schwemer notes that another possibility is that might have been an epithet of Hattian
Taru in origin. It is presumed Ziparawa also functioned as a god of vegetation. He appears in a Palaic myth assumed to be analogous to the Hittite composition about
Telipinu.
Kataḫzipuri, a Hattian goddess most likely comparable to or outright identical with
Kamrušepa was likely regarded as Ziparwa's spouse. They were regarded as the main pair of deities in the
Palaic pantheon. ==Worship==