Hurrian language
| Hurrian | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Mitanni |
| Region | Mesopotamia |
| Era | attested 2300–1000 BC |
|
Hurro-Urartian
|
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
|
Linguist list
|
xhu |
| Glottolog | hurr1240 |
The Hurrian language was spoken by the Hurrians (Khurrites), a people who entered northern Mesopotamia around 2300 BC and had mostly vanished by 1000 BC. Hurrian was the language of the Mitanni kingdom in northern Mesopotamia, and was likely spoken at least initially in Hurrian settlements in Syria. It is generally believed that the speakers of this language originally came from the Armenian Highlands and spread over southeast Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC.
Hurrian is an ergative, agglutinative language that, together with Urartian, constitutes the Hurro-Urartian family. I.M. Diakonoff and S. Starostin see similarities between Hurrian and the Northeast Caucasian languages, and thus place it in the Alarodian family. Examples of the proposed phonological correspondences are Proto-East-Caucasian *l- > Hurrian t-, Proto-East-Caucasian *-dl- > Hurrian -r- (Diakonoff & Starostin).
Some scholars, such as I. J. Gelb and E. A. Speiser, tried to equate Hurrians and "Subarians".
The earliest Hurrian text fragments consist of lists of names and places from the end of the third millennium BC. The first full texts date to the reign of king Tish-atal of Urkesh and were found on a stone tablet accompanying the Hurrian foundation pegs known as the "Urkish lions." At the start of the second milliennium BC. Archeologists have discovered the texts of numerous spells, incantations, prophecies and letters at sites including Hattusha, Mari, Tuttul, Babylon, Ugarit and others. Early study of the language, however, was entirely based on the Mitanni letter, found in 1887 at Amarna in Egypt, written by the Hurrian king Tushratta to the pharaoh Amenhotep III. The Hurro-Urartian relation was recognized as early as 1890 by Sayce (ZA 5, 1890, 260-274) and Jensen (ZA 6, 1891, 34-72).
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