Puduhepa came from Lawazantiya in Kizzuwatna, a region of southern Anatolia where Hurrian religious traditions had a strong presence. Her father, Pentipsharri, was a priest, and she also had a religious background. Her exact birth date is not securely known. Hattusili's Apology places their marriage after his return from the Egyptian campaign associated with the battle of Kadesh, conventionally dated to 1274 BCE. They were therefore married before his later accession to the Hittite throne. The original sequence matters: Puduhepa did not first become his bride when he became Great King.

In the Apology, Hattusili presents the goddess Ishtar, identified in this cultural setting with Shaushka, as the guide of his life and household. He says that he married Puduhepa at the goddess's command and that divine favour sustained their family. These are statements within a royal account designed to explain and justify his career. They preserve the religious language in which the couple understood or presented their authority, not independent evidence that a supernatural promise determined the marriage. Puduhepa's later religious work makes the connection with her earlier priestly setting especially significant.

As Great Queen she held the office commonly called Tawananna. Hittite queens before her had possessed substantial religious and administrative authority, so the office was not her invention. Her name appears on royal sealings with Hattusili III and later with Tudhaliya IV. These impressions show that her authority mattered to official transactions, although they do not mean that every decree bore her seal or that king and queen had identical powers in every sphere. The material was clay, impressed by a seal; it should not be confused with the wax seals more familiar from later European documents.

Diplomacy made that authority visible beyond Hatti. Surviving correspondence connects Puduhepa with Ramesses II, Nefertari and the negotiations between the royal households. The language of brothers and sisters expressed diplomatic rank and alliance rather than biological kinship. Letters concerning gifts, messengers and marriage arrangements reveal how much work followed the formal peace between Hattusili and Ramesses. They also show a queen responding directly to a foreign ruler rather than communicating only through her husband. These thirteenth-century exchanges belong to the Hittite archives and their wider diplomatic network, not to the earlier Amarna Letters.

A daughter of Hattusili and Puduhepa married Ramesses II in his thirty-fourth regnal year, in the mid-1240s BCE, and received the Egyptian name Maathorneferure. Correspondence about the marriage includes the practical and political questions surrounding the princess, her entourage and the wealth transferred with her. Such letters are evidence for royal negotiation, but they do not provide access to every private feeling attributed to the participants in modern retellings. Puduhepa's role belongs within the continuing relationship between the two courts: the marriage strengthened an alliance already sustained through a treaty, messengers and repeated exchanges.

Religion remained central to her queenship. She sponsored the collection and copying of ritual traditions and is associated with prayers that drew together Hurrian and Hittite divine identities. In a prayer for Hattusili's well-being, the Sun Goddess of Arinna is connected with Hepat, a major Hurrian goddess. Such texts show that royal religion was not static: inherited traditions could be organised and brought into relation within the court. Her administrative and religious activities were interconnected, since temple resources, ritual obligations and the royal household formed parts of the same world.

After Hattusili's death, Puduhepa continued to be attested under Tudhaliya IV. Her position demonstrates the continuity that the office of Great Queen could provide across a change of kings. The surviving evidence does not establish every year of her life or a precise date of death, and it should not be turned into an exact forty-year marriage or an uninterrupted personal account of all later diplomacy. What remains is substantial enough without those additions: sealings, letters and religious compositions that document her participation in royal affairs.

The archives of Hattusa brought this record into modern scholarship, together with the work of generations of excavators and readers of cuneiform. Clay tablets preserve the language of commands, requests, prayers and negotiated relationships, but each survives within its own material and historical context. Not every tablet can be assigned to one final fire, and not every first-person royal letter was personally written by the named ruler. Puduhepa's voice reaches us through the scribal practices of a palace, yet her documented authority remains clear within them.