Mark Ronan's website
Hurrian and the Hurrians
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The
Hurrian language was written during a 700-year period. The earliest known
document is a royal inscription dated shortly before 2000 BC (though Hurrian
words and names appear in earlier documents), and the last known texts date
from the late fourteenth century BC. The language was widely spoken in what
is now northern Syria, northern Iraq, and southeast Turkey, and by the end of
the sixteenth century BC, the kings of Mittani had united most Hurrian cities
under their control. The Mitanni introduced some linguistic terms of
Indo-Aryan origin, dealing for example with horse training, and gods from the
Vedic (Indian) pantheon, but the language remained Hurrian. During
the fifteenth century BC there was a struggle with Egypt over control of
Syria, but shortly after 1400 BC, Hurrians and Egyptians made a peace
treaty, and there were dynastic marriages. A famous letter from King
Tushratta of Mitanni, discovered at Amarna in Egypt, concerned his daughter's
marriage to the Pharaoh Amenhotep III, and was written in Hurrian rather than
Akkadian, the usual language of diplomatic correspondence;
this 'Mitanni letter' of about 700 lines is a primary source for learning
Hurrian. Not long after these events, Hurrian power declined rapidly. The
eastern territory was gradually taken over by Assyria, which moved Hurrians
out and settled Assyrians in their place, but in the west, Hurrian cultic
traditions and learning were preserved by the Hittites who introduced them
into their capital at Hattusa in Anatolia. This is where most Hurrian texts
have been found, far removed from their origin. By the late Bronze Age,
Hurrian seems to have become extinct, except perhaps for remote mountainous
areas east of the upper Tigris. The
only language close to Hurrian is Urartian, once spoken in what is now the
extreme east of Turkey. The name Urartian is from ancient Assyrian, and is
related to the Biblical name Ararat, as in the mountains of Ararat (Genesis 8:4). Texts in Urartian date to a
200-year period from the ninth century until shortly before 600 BC. This
is hundreds of years after the last Hurrian documents disappear, but Urartian
is closer to Old Hurrian, rather than the later version of the language, so
it is not a descendent of Hurrian. The two languages simply have a common
source. Some scholars believe Hurrian and Urartian to be related to the
Northeast Caucasian languages, which include Chechen, but this is a distant
relationship at best. Hurrian
grammar and vocabulary are imperfectly understood, though it was clearly an
agglutinative language, meaning that words are built up from a sequence of
units each expressing a well-defined grammatical meaning. For example case
markers (more than one) may be attached to a noun, and various grammatical
markers are attached to a verb. The verb comes at the end of the clause, and
there seems to have been a rich inventory of different moods for the verb,
not all well understood. The language is also strongly ergative. Hurrian
was written mostly in cuneiform syllables, though a few late texts found at
Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra) in Syria are written in the local alphabetic
script, presumably by Ugaritic scribes. Further information on the
Hurrians is given on the Wikipedia website. |
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