| |
|
The Hurrians established themselves as rulers of small kingdoms in northern Mesopotamia and Syria. They have been identified at ancient Nuzi and Urkesh and other sites.
By about 2400 BC the Hurrians had expanded southward from the highlands of Anatolia. They infiltrated and occupied a broad arc of fertile farmland stretching from the Khabur River Valley to the foothills of the Zagros Mountains.
They spoke an agglutinative language unrelated to neighboring Semitic or Indo-European languages but to Urartian - a language spoken in northeastern Anatolia. Recent studies are showing some affinity of "Hurro-Urartian" to Northern Caucasian languages. Tolstov identified them as the founders of Khwarezmia which he exlained as meaning Hurri-Land. Hurrian speakers formed the majority population of the kingdom of the Mitanni, though they appear to have been governed by a class of foreign nobility. Hittite exhibits many Hurrian loanwords, including most of the religious vocabulary. Hesiod's theogony seems to owe significant episodes to Hurrian paragons.
See also Horites