Home › Hurrian

Hurrian

The Hurrian or Hurrites or Khurrites or Hourri or Churra or Hurri or Hurrites in Egyptian old, are an indigenous inhabitant of Asia Minor during the Antiquity. They will establish the kingdom of Hourri, which result from the later Mitanni in the early second millennium in a region adjacent to northern Mesopotamia.

/ / Origins

The origins of Hurrian are poorly known. It seems whether a people native to areas south of the Caucasus , in the same group that Urartians. They appear in history in the sources of Ebla in XXIV ^centuryBC. AD , when they migrate south in the mountains north of Mesopotamia , in Kurdistan and in the Zagros , where they form small kingdoms. They are fierce opponents to the rulers of Akkad , and those of the Third Dynasty of Ur.

Expansion

In the course of the first half of the ^second millennium BC. BC , the Hurrian spread in Syria 's north (it is found in the archives of Mari ). After the fall of kingdoms Amorite , they become the dominant tribe in this region, and their expansionist kingdoms confront Hittite the ^sixteenth century BC. AD Powerful Hurrian kingdoms then appear as Kizzuwatna (in Cilicia ), but mostly the Mitanni , which is centered around the triangle Khabur in Syria 's north. This kingdom, led initially by an elite Indo-European, but populated mostly of Hurrian, extending its dominance over its neighbors from the ^sixteenth and ^fifteenth century BC. BC , in Syria and Assyria. This expansionism confront him successively Egyptians and the Hittites, Assyrians, and finally, after being freed from the yoke Mitannian destroy the kingdom definitively XIII ^centuryBC. BC The Hittite kingdom's last dynasty, that of Suppiluliuma I , is in all probability itself Hurrian origin, and yet contributed significantly to the weakening of the kingdom of Mitanni.

Religion

Hurrian religion is very similar religious background Anatolia. His chief god is Teshub , the storm god, whose consort Hebat , and son Sharruma. Other important deities were Hurrian Kushukh , the Moon God, Shimegi , the sun god, and Shaushka , the Goddess of Love. The Hurrian pantheon also included Hepit , the god of heaven, Kumarbi (Nature), or Astabis (War) and Ishara (Scripture). Hurrian mythology has developed myths such as the Cycle Kumarbi (the "Theogony Hurrian).

Language

There is no need for a Rosetta stone to decipher a language, and recognize the morphology. As the proto-Sinaitic and Proto-Canaanite, in the Hurrian offers a striking example. Emmanuel Laroche released, updating the earlier work of J. Friedrich and Speiser, a glossary of the Hurrian language in 1980. He described their morphology, agglutinating and Caucasian family of languages, and provides a fairly comprehensive glossary in the current state of knowledge. It is possible however that the discoveries of cuneiform inscriptions of Syria enrich this approach Hurrian.

Hurrian language was unclear, and its translation has been improved gradually by the glosses Akkadian, Hittite and Ugaritic, and the discovery of Hittite-Hurrian bilingual texts. "In areas where Hurrians were mixed with the indigenous population, writes Laroche, and where, because of their density, had spread a state of bilingualism, the glosses are multiplying (...) The word Hurrian tends to s impose, and to supplant the term of the dominant language, so, to varying degrees, Nuzi, Ras Shamra-and Bogazkoy. The first known reference to this kingdom appears in a letter from the pharaoh Amenhotep III (1417 - 1379 BC) to King Tushratta Hurrian. This reference was discovered in Egypt in 1887 in the vast archives of the International Amarna correspondence and remains the only really important source for this language. A number of Hurrian texts have been uncovered in the Hittite archives Hattusas (around 1400), Mari (around 1750) and Ugarit (ca. 1500). The texts of Ugarit are written with a consonantal writing and include Sumero-Hurrian vocabulary. Hattusas also provided excerpts of a translation of the Hurrian period of Babylonian Gilgamesh. Names and vocabulary Hurrian also appear in a wide range of texts belonging to the tradition of cuneiform in the mid second millennium BC.

Hurrian language is a language ergative , agglutinative. However, this language has no connection with the Semitic languages or even with the Indo-European languages. Hurrian language is not based Laroche ancestor of the Urartian but the two languages are descended from a common prehistoric same language also very obvious way a parent of Caucasian languages today. Some experts believe that there is a link between the Hurrian language, the Georgian and South Caucasian language Kartvelian languages. Some similarities were also found between the Hurrian language and Armenian.

The Hurrian cuneiform alphabet adopted the Akkadian as writing material. But the Hurrian texts are relatively rare use of Sumerian ideograms do not allow to know the exact phonetics of words.

External Links

(En) The great kingdoms of Asia Minor, the Hurrian
The Rise of the Hurrian (full text by Robert Antonio)
The Hurrian and the Ancient Near East History (full text by Jeremiah Genest)

Bibliography

Emmanuel Laroche, "Glossary of the Hurrian language", Editions Klincksieck, Paris, 1980
Diakonoff, "The Prehistory of the Armenian people" (the various Caucasian language families and their links with Armenian and Georgian)
(In) G. Wilhelm, Gernot: The Hurrian, Warminster Aris & Philips, 1989
J. Freu, History of Mitanni, L'Harmattan, collection Kubaba, Paris, 2003
(To) I. Wegner, Hurritisch: eine Einfhrung, Harrasowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden, 2000
L. Bonfante, J. Chadwick, BF Cook, WV Davies, JF Healey, JT Hooker, CBF Walker, The Birth of the Scriptures, Seuil, 1997