The Hurrians were a people of the Ancient Near East, who lived in northern Mesopotamia and areas to the immediate east and west, beginning approximately 2500 BC. They probably originated in the Caucasus and entered from the north, but this is not certain. Their known homeland was centred in Subar, the Khabur River valley, and later they established themselves as rulers of small kingdoms throughout northern Mesopotamia and Syria. The largest and most influential Hurrian nation was the kingdom of Mitanni.
- For the history of the Late Bronze Age kingdom of Mitanni (1500-1300 BC), view the Mitanni article.
- The pre-Hurrian culture of northern Mesopotamia is described in the Tell Halaf, Tell Brak, Ubaid and Uruk period articles.
- The Hurrians also played a substantial part in the History of the Hittites.
Language
Like most aspects of Hurrian society, their origins are still a mystery. The Hurrians spoke an agglutinative language, conventionally called Hurrian, unrelated to neighboring Semitic or Indo-European languages, but clearly related to Urartian — a language spoken about a millennium later in northeastern Anatolia — and possibly, very distantly, to the present-day Northeast Caucasian languages.
The Hurrians adopted the Akkadian cuneiform script for their own language about 2000 BC. This has enabled scholars to read the Hurrian language. The number of Hurrian texts yet discovered make up only a small number. They also tended use a lot of Sumerian logograms whose Hurrian pronounciation is unknown. The understanding of the Hurrian language is therefore far from complete and many words are missing from their vocabulary.
Texts in the Hurrian language itself have been found at Hattusa, Ugarit (Ras Shamra) as well as one of the longest of the Amarna letters; written by King Tushratta of Mitanni to Pharaoh Amenhotep III. It was the only long Hurrian text known until a multi-tablet collection of literature in Hurrian with a Hittite translation was discovered at Hattusas in 1983.
History
By about 2400 BC, the Hurrians had expanded from the foothills of the Caucasus. In the following centuries, Hurrian names occur sporadically in northern Mesopotamia and the area of Kirkuk in modern Iraq. Their presence was attested at Nuzi, Urkesh and other sites. They eventually infiltrated and occupied a broad arc of fertile farmland stretching from the Khabur River valley to the foothills of the Zagros Mountains.
The city state Urkesh
The Khabur River valley became the heart of the Hurrian lands for a millenia. The first known Hurrian kingdom emerged around the city of Urkesh at the end of the third millennium BC. The end of the Akkadian Empire enabled the Hurrians to gain control of the area. This region had since long been the center of rich cultures (see Tell Halaf and Tell Brak). Now the Hurrians could benefit from this and organize their own advanced city state.
The city state of Urkesh still had some powerful neighbours though. At some point in the early second millennium BC the Amorite kingdom of Mari to the south subdued Urkesh into a vassal state. In the continous power struggle over Mesopotamia another Amorite dynasty made themselves masters over Mari in the eightteenth century BC. The capital of this Old Assyrian kingdom called Shubat-Enlil was founded some distance from Urkesh at another Hurrian settlement in the Khabur River valley.
The kingdom of Yamhad
The Hurrians also migrated west in this period. By 1725 BC they are found also in parts of northern Syria, such as Alalakh. The Amoritic-Hurrian kingdom of Yamhad is recorded as struggling for this area with the early Hittite king Hattusilis I around 1600 BC. Hurrians also settled in the coastal region of Adaniya in the country of Kizzuwatna. Yamhad eventually weakened to the powerful Hittites, but this also opened Anatolia for Hurrian cultural influences. The Hitties lend much from the Hurrian culture over several centuries.
The emergence of Mitanni
The Hittites continued expanding south after the defeat of Yamhad. The army of the Hittite king Mursili I made its way down to Babylon and sacked the city. The destruction of the Babylonian kingdom, as well as the kingdom of Yamhad, helped the rise of another Hurrian dynasty. The first ruler was a legendary king called Kirta who founded the kingdom of Mitanni around 1500 BC. Mitanni gradually grew from the region around Khabur river valley and became the most powerful kingdom of the Near East c.1450-1350 BC. Its history is treated in the article Mitanni.
The state of Arrapha
Another Hurrian kingdom also benefited from the demise of Babylonian power in sixteenth century BC. Hurrians had inhabited the region northeast of river Tigris, around the modern Kurdish city of Kirkuk. This was the kingdom of Arrapha. Excavations at Yorgan Tepe, ancient Nuzi, proved to be one of the most important sites for our knowledge about the Hurrians. Hurrian kings such as Ithi-Teshup and Ithiya ruled over Arrapha, yet by the mid-fifteenth century BC they had become vassals of the Great King of Mitanni. Arrapha itself was destroyed by the Assyrians in the fourteenth century BC.
The end of the Hurrians
By the thirteenth century BC all of the Hurrian states had been vanquished by other peoples. The heart of the Hurrian lands, the Khabur river valley, became an Assyrian province. It is not clear what happened to the Hurrian people at the end of the Bronze Age. Some scholars have suggested Hurrians lived on in the country of Subria north of Assyria during the early Iron Age.
The Hurrian population of Syria in the following centuries seems to have given up their language in favor of the Assyrian dialect of Akkadian or, more likely, Aramaic. Interestingly enough, it is around this same time that an aristocracy speaking Urartian, similar to old Hurrian, seems to have first imposed itself on the native Indo-European speaking population around Lake Van, and formed the Kingdom of Urartu.
The Indo-Aryan connection
The question of Indo-Aryan cultural influences, or even a ruling aritocracy, among the Hurrians is an ambigous issue. Early scholars were convinced the Hurrians were dominated by an elite of foreign rulers. These foreigners spoke an Indo-Iranian language from Central Asia closely related to Avestan and apparently somewhat more closely to Vedic Sanskrit (for example, the word for "one" in this language was aika, similar to Sanskrit eka vs. Avestan aeva).
They should have introduced the cremation of their dead, and introduced the use of the horse and chariot in the battlefield — a situation that has obvious similarities to the events in northern India at about the same time. While this foreign aristocracy eventually abandoned their language in favor of that of their Hurrian subjects, they retained Indo-Iranian names, they invoked Vedic gods in some of their treaties, and some words from their Indo-Iranian language survived as loanwords in Hurrian, particularly technical terms related to horses and their training.
Particularly the state of Mitanni, itself believed to be an Indo-Aryan word, was connected with the Indo-Aryan culture. Most rulers of Mitanni seem to have had Indo-Aryan names, and the ruling aristocracy was called maryannu, meaning "young warrior" in Sanskrit marya.
Culture and Society
Knowledge of Hurrian culture relies on archaeological excavations at sites such as Nuzi and Alalakh as well as on cuneiform tablets, primarily from Hattusas (Boghazköy), the capital of the Hittites, whose civilization was greatly influenced by the Hurrians. Tablets from Nuzi, Alalakh, and other cities with Hurrian populations (as shown by personal names) reveal Hurrian cultural features even though they were written in Akkadian. Hurrian cylinder seals were carefully carved and often portrayed mythological motives. They are a key to the understanding of Hurrian culture and history.
Impact
Hurrian speakers formed the majority population of the kingdom of Mitanni, though they appear to have been governed by a class of foreign nobility. Their literature had a deep influence on the Hittites, and the Indo-European Hittite language exhibits many Hurrian loanwords, including most of the religious vocabulary.
Two episodes from Hesiod's Theogony may be derived from Hurrian myths: the castration of Uranus by Cronus may be derived from the castration of Anu by Kumarbi, while Zeus's overthrow of Cronus and Cronus's regurgitation of the swallowed gods is like the Hurrian myth of Teshub and KumarbiTemplate:Fn. It has been argued that the worship of Attis drew on Hurrian mythTemplate:Fn.
Connections and origin theories
It is believed by some scholars that the Hurrians mixed with their neighbors, such as the Armenians after arriving in the Caucasus around 2700 BC from an unknown place. Another theory is that the Armenians came to the Caucasus with the Hurrians from the Indo-European homeland.
I. J. Gelb & E. A. Speiser believed Subarians had been the linguistic and ethnic substratum of northern Mesopotamia since earliest times, while Hurrians were merely late arrivals.
Tolstov identified the Hurrians as the founders of Khwarezmia, which he explained as meaning Hurri-Land.
In the past, Bible scholars sometimes identified them as the Biblical Horites, Hivites and Jebusites, though there is little factual basis for such a connection.
Several other ancient peoples of the region, including the Kesedim, Subarians, Gutians, Kassites and Lullubi have all been described at one time or another as Hurrian peoples. Recently, with the discovery of the Tikunani Prism, there has been growing support for the theory that the Habiru, who were for a time believed to be the ancient Hebrews, may have been Hurrian speakers.
See also
Notes
Template:Fnb Güterbock, Hans Gustav: "Hittite Religion"; in Forgotten Religions: Including Some Living Primitive Religions (ed. Vergilius Ferm) (NY, Philosophical Library, 1950), pp. 88–89, 103–104
Template:Fnb Suggested by Jane Lightfoot in the Times Literary Supplement 22 July 2005 p 27, in her account of Philippe Borgeaud, Mother of the Gods: from Cybele to the Virgin Mary, Johns Hopkins 2005 ISBN080187985X.
Books
- Isaac Asimov, The Near East: 10,000 Years of History,Boston :Houghton Mifflin, 1968.
- Ignace J. Gelb, 1944, Hurrians and Subarians, Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization No. 22, Illinois, University of Chicago Press.
External links
- Vyacheslav V. Ivanov, "Comparative Notes on Hurro-Urartian, Northern Caucasian" discusses the difficulties and disagreements faced by linguists working in this area, the term Alarodian being created especially for the Hurro-Urartian-Nakh-Avar languages as a family.
- A bibliography on Hurrian
- A bibliography on Urartian
- The Hurrian kingdom of Mitanni