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The Hurrians were a people of the Ancient Near East,
who apparently entered Mesopotamia from the north before 2500 BC and established themselves as rulers of small kingdoms in northern Mesopotamia and
Syria. The largest and most influential Hurrian nation was the kingdom of Mitanni, which lasted from 1450 BC until its
destruction by Assyria in 1270 BC.
Several other ancient peoples of the region, including the Kesedim, Subarians, Kassites and Lullubi have all
been described at one time or another as Hurrian peoples. Recently (and especially after 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 a Hurrian people, too.
History
Their origin, like most aspects of their society, is still a mystery. The Hurrians spoke an agglutinative language,
conventionally called Hurrian, which was 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.
By about 2400 BC, the Hurrians had expanded southward from the Zagros Mountains or perhaps from the highlands of Anatolia beyond. 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 and 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.
Around 1775 BC, in the reign of Hammurabi, Hurrians are recorded as entering the Babylonian Empire in the region of Chagar Bazar. By 1725 BC
they are found also in parts of northern Syria, such as Alalakh.
The Hurrians apparently became a major political power after being dominated by an elite of foreign rulers. These foreigners
spoke either Avestan/Vedic Sanskrit or a closely-related precursor of that language from Central Asia. They cremated 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 those of their Hurrian subjects, they retained Indo-European names, complete with
references to Vedic gods.
Under these "foreign" rulers, the Hurrians expanded considerably towards the south and west. There was no single Hurrian
Empire, but by 1540-1520 BC a number of
Hurrian-dominated states had been established in northern Mesopotamia,
especially in the region of Khanigalbat, centered on the upper Tigris River to the
north of Assyria. By 1530 BC the state of
Mitanni, still with a mostly-Hurrian population and foreign-named aristocracy, was
founded between the Euphrates and Balikh rivers with its capital at Washshukanni (thought to
have been in northern Syria). Mitanni rapidly became the centre of Hurrian power and culture, and soon dominated central
Mesopotamia and the Upper Tigris, including Assyria. This kingdom collapsed around 1270
BC.
Archaeological knowledge of the Hurrians is still fairly scanty, relying mostly on cuneiform tablets from Hattusas, the capital of the Hittites, whose civilisation was greatly influenced by the Hurrians. Thousands more Hurrian
tablets have been found at Nuzi, Boghazköy,
Ras Shamra, and Alalakh.
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.
Material culture
The Hurrians were masterful ceramists; their pottery is a common find in Mesopotamia and in the lands west of the Euphrates,
and was appreciated in distant Egypt, by the time of the New Kingdom.
Impact and connections
Tolstov identified the Hurrians as the
founders of Khwarezmia, which he explained as meaning Hurri-Land.
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 Kumarbi1. Bible scholars
often identify them as the biblical Horites, Hivites and Jebusites, though there is little factual basis for such a connection.
Ironically, there is much more evidence for the Hurrian origin of Biblical Hebrew culture (but not the Hebrew language) which is otherwise at odds with its linguistically related
Canaanite surroundings.
Notes
Note 1: 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
Books
- Ignace J. Gelb, 1944, Hurrians and Subarians, Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization No. 22, Illinois, University of
Chicago Press.
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