Hurrians

Across the Bronze Age, a people speaking a language unrelated to the Semitic and Indo-European tongues around them spread through northern Syria, upper Mesopotamia and south-eastern Anatolia. These were the Hurrians. They founded kingdoms from Urkesh to Mitanni, shaped the religion of the Hittites, and by the early Iron Age had merged into the populations around them.

Where the Hurrians came from is disputed. Some historians place their homeland in the Armenian highlands or the Caucasus, and several scholars have linked them with the Kura–Araxes culture; Antonio Sagona doubted the link because the two material cultures differ so much, while the excavators of Tell Mozan, Giorgio Buccellati and Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati, pointed to similarities in local finds. Others, such as H. W. F. Saggs, thought they might be native to northern Mesopotamia, whereas Igor Diakonoff saw them as newcomers arriving in the third millennium BCE. In 2023 Alwin Kloekhorst proposed that the spread of Caucasus hunter-gatherer ancestry might trace Hurrian-speaking movements, a hypothesis rather than a settled finding.

The Khabur valley, on today's border between Syria and Turkey, was the core of Hurrian country for around a thousand years. Their first known kingdom grew up around Urkesh, modern Tell Mozan, in the third millennium BCE, apparently allied with the Akkadian Empire by the reign of Naram-Sin (around 2254–2218 BCE). One king of Urkesh, Tupkish, bore a Hurrian name, while his queen Uqnitum had an Akkadian one. By the time of the Third Dynasty of Ur, Hurrian names were found from the Zagros to Tur Abdin. In the Old Babylonian period Urkesh became a vassal of Mari.

Hurrian groups moved west into northern Syria, appearing at Alalakh by 1725 BCE and in Kizzuwatna in southern Anatolia. From the late seventeenth century BCE they set up states ruled by a chariot-fighting aristocracy. The greatest was Mitanni, which rose before 1550 BCE and appears in the records of the pharaohs Thutmose I and Thutmose III; the Egyptians usually called it Naharin and the Assyrians Hanigalbat. It was hemmed in by the Hittites, Egypt, the Kassites and later Assyria. After a succession crisis, the Hittites destroyed it around 1350–1325 BCE. A Hurrian-speaking remnant survived in Shupria, north of the upper Tigris, until Assyria conquered it in 673–672 BCE.

Much of what is known comes from tablets found at Nuzi, Alalakh and the Hittite capital Hattusa, many written in Akkadian. Hurrian potters made the wheel-thrown Khabur and Nuzi wares, which archaeologists use to date layers in city mounds, and they also worked glass and metal. They are credited, alongside the Hittites, with bringing the horse-drawn war chariot into wide use in the Near East, and Egyptians valued them as horsemen. Hurrian texts from Ugarit, from around 1400 BCE, include the oldest known written music.

The storm god Teshub headed the pantheon, with his consort Hebat, the goddess Shaushka and the elder god Kumarbi. Through the cult centre of Kummanni, Hurrian religion blended with that of the Hittites. The Hittite-preserved Kumarbi myths have often been compared with the succession of gods in Hesiod's Theogony. Hurrian was an agglutinative language related to Urartian; attempts to link the pair with North-East Caucasian languages remain unproven. One of the longest Amarna letters was written in Hurrian by Tushratta of Mitanni to Amenhotep III.

Neighbouring peoples had absorbed the Hurrians by the start of the Iron Age. The kingdom of Urartu, whose language was a close relative, later ruled part of the same highlands, though whether the Urartians were a Hurrian offshoot or a parallel people is debated. Hurrian myths and gods survived in Hittite and Syrian religion long after.

Our maps draw a Hurrian territory, labelled Hurrians or Hurrian Kingdoms, in 3000, 2000 and 1500 BCE. The outline is approximate, and the earliest map comes before the first written evidence for Hurrian kingdoms later in the third millennium. Sumer and, later, the Hittites and Assyria were among its neighbours.