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HURRIANS

(Akk. ḫurri)

An ancient Near Eastern people widely attested in the 3rd-2nd millennium b.c.e., founders of the powerful kingdom of Mitanni.

History

The Hurrians first appear in the archaeological record in the Sargonic levels at Tell Mozan (ancient Urkesh) in north Syria. Inscriptions with Hurrian toponyms suggest a period of settlement and occupation that preceded the documentation. The absence of Hurrian personal names in the Ebla texts indicates that their expansion from the north-northeast had not yet reached western Syria (i.e., west of the Euphrates). Similarly, the absence of Hurrian names in texts from Tel Beydar in the ³abûr region shows that they had not yet infiltrated northwestern Syria. Thus, their appearance, or at least their rise to prominence, must coincide with the rise of the Akkadian dynasty or shortly thereafter. Naram-sin’s conquest of a coalition of Hurrians led by the kings of Simurrum and Nawar subjected the Hurrian city-states to Akkadian control at the end of the 23rd century. By the end of the Sargonic period (or the beginning of Ur III) the inscriptions of Atal-šen and Tiš-atal demonstrate a continued expanded Hurrian presence in northeastern Syria and north Mesopotamia and the adoption of writing. Šulgi, the long-reigning second king of the Ur III dynasty, fought a series of battles against Hurrian city-states along the northeastern borders of his empire. Hurrian personal names are encountered frequently in the archival texts of the Ur III bureaucracy. By the end of the 3rd millennium Hurrians are found in eastern Anatolia, northern and western Syria and Mesopotamia, with particular concentration in the hill country of northeastern Assyria and probably eastern Anatolia.

Hurrians survived the widespread disruptions that characterize the end of the 3rd millennium. In Middle Bronze Age Anatolia and Syro-Canaan they appear among the various population groups together with the Assyrians, Anatolians, Canaanites, Amorites, and Babylonians, with concentration in eastern Anatolia and most of Syria. In the 19th century they appear in the Old Assyrian merchant accounts from Kanesh (Kültepe) where they are associated with cities south of the Anti-Taurus Mountains but not yet in central Anatolia. During the Mari age Hurrian city-states are under the control of Šamši-adad, who governed from his capital at Šubat-enlil (Tell Leylan), but after his death Hurrian city-states appear as independent entities primarily in upper Mesopotamia and east of the Tigris but also as far west as Urshu and Halab (Aleppo). By the middle of the 17th century Hurrian power clashed with the emerging Hittite Old Kingdom, and ³attušili I campaigned to stop their expansion.

Coincident with the collapse at the end of the Middle Bronze/Old Babylonian period, the Hittites began to expand into north Syria. By the late 16th century they encountered a substantial Hurrian power east of the Euphrates called Mitanni that had previously invaded central Anatolia in the early years of ³attušili I and whose kings bore Indo-aryan names but whose population spoke Hurrian. Beginning with the reign of Thutmose III, Syro-Canaan was referred to as ³uru in Egyptian documents. Hurrian power reached its peak in the early 15th century when Kizzuwatna (Cilicia) was annexed during the reign of Zidanta II. Excavations at Nuzi in north Mesopotamia revealed the details of provincial Hurrian society over five generations with its complex social, economic, and legal customs in the 15-14th centuries. The nearly 5000 texts found at Nuzi were written in Akkadian by Hurrian-speaking scribes and were, until recently, the major source of Hurrian vocabulary. The Hurrians’ capital, Wašukkani, has not yet been identified (Tell Fakhāriya?). By the late 15th century Hurrians had become a major segment of the population of Syria (e.g., at Alalakh, Halab, Qatna, Ugarit), had intermarried with the Hittite royal family, and were in communication with the kings of Egypt. Hurrian religion was widely practiced, and Hurrian gods and goddesses worshipped over a wide area. By the late 13th century Hurrian power began to wane with the conquest of Syria by Šuppiluliuma I. The Hurrian kingdom of ³anigalbat disappeared from contemporary records. With the devastating campaigns of the Assyrian king Tukulti-ninurta I in Syria, the deportation of large numbers of Hurrians, and the subsequent collapse of the Late Bronze Age civilizations associated with the invasions of the Sea Peoples, Hurrian power was eliminated and the Hurrians assyrianized. Subsequently they were overwhelmed by the incursions of Aramaic-speaking tribes. The Hurrian language ceased to appear in written sources in Syro-Mesopotamia, although its related language, Urartian, continued to be written and spoken in eastern Anatolia for the next few centuries.

In the Bible, the Hurrians have been associated with the Horites (Heb. ḥōrî), although there is no extrabiblical validation of this equation, linguistic or otherwise. Furthermore, the identification of certain royal names among the Hyksos with Hurrian personal names is no longer widely accepted. That there were Hurrians in southern Canaan and possibly in Egypt in the Middle and Late Bronze Ages is a likely but unproven possibility. Hurrians are known to have been as far north in Anatolia as Sapinuwa (Ortaköy), 50 km. (30 mi.) NE of ³attuša/Boghazköy, and as far west as Cyprus and possibly Crete.

Language and Literature

The Hurrians had come under Akkadian influence already in the 23rd century. Hurrian personal names and titles appear first in the seal inscriptions from Urkesh. They wrote their earliest inscriptions in Akkadian, but the underlying spoken language was Hurrian. The Hurrian language is itself an isolate possibly related to Northeast Caucasian. The earliest fully written Hurrian religious texts appear only in the 18th-century Mari archives, suggesting a tradition of written literature preceding its first occurrence at Mari. In the 3rd millennium it is known primarily from personal names. In the first half of the 2nd millennium religious texts and rituals dominate, although recently a small number of letters in Hurrian have been discovered. In the 14th-15th centuries the Hurro-Akkadian texts from Nuzi provide a substantial Hurrian vocabulary and occasional grammatical forms. Hurrian was one of the many languages spoken and written at Ugarit and is among the languages in the quadralingual dictionaries found there. The recent discovery at Boghazköy of the Hurro-Hittite bilingual “Epic of Manumission” (early 14th century, but probably originally a MB text), revealed a fully developed literary epic tradition in Hurrian previously known mostly via Hittite translations. Hitherto, the longest known Hurrian text (494 lines) had been the diplomatic letter of King Tušratta of Mitanni to Amenophis III concerning the negotiations of brideprice and dowry for Princess Tatu-hepa, who was to be sent to Egypt to marry the pharaoh. There are strong indications that a rich and varied written literary tradition existed among the Hurrians as early as the 18th century. Excavations at the northern Anatolian site of Ortaköy have uncovered a large Hurrian library of more than 600 texts and fragments whose content, mostly rituals, includes many Hurrian-Hittite bilinguals.

Bibliography. G. Gragg, “Hurrian,” OEANE 3:125-26; M. Kelly-Buccellati, “Nuzi Viewed from Irkesh, Urkesh Viewed from Nuzi: Stock Elements and Framing Devices in Northern Syro-Mesopotamia,” in Richard F. S. Starr Memorial Volume, ed. D. I. Owen and G. Wilhelm. Studies on the Civilization and Culture of Nuzi and the Hurrians 8 (Bethesda, 1996), 247-68; N. Naʾaman, “The Hurrians and the End of the Middle Bronze Age in Palestine,” Levant 26 (1994): 175-87; D. L. Stein, “Hurrians,” OEANE 3: 126-30; G. Wilhelm, The Hurrians (Warminster, 1989); “The Hurrians in the Western Parts of the Ancient Near East,” in Mutual Influences of Peoples and Cultures in the Ancient Near East, ed. M. Malul (Haifa, 1996), 17-30; “The Kingdom of Mitanni in Second-Millennium Upper Mesopotamia,” CANE 2:1243-54.

David I. Owen

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HURRIANS

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)