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The Hurrians were an Alarodian language speaking people of the Ancient Near East, who established themselves as rulers of small kingdoms in northern Mesopotamia and Syria. They have been identified at ancient Nuzi and Urkesh and other sites. The Kesedim, Urartuans, Mitanni, Subarians, Habiru, Kassu and Lulubi have all been described at one time or another as Hurrian peoples.

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 Hurrian, an agglutinative language unrelated to neighboring Semitic or Indo-European languages but related to Urartian - a language spoken in northeastern Anatolia. Recent studies are showing some affinity of Hurro-Urartian to the Northern Caucasian languages.

Tolstov identified the Hurrians 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. The Indo-European Hittite language exhibits many Hurrian loanwords, including most of the religious vocabulary. Hesiod's theogony seems to owe significant episodes to Hurrian paragons.

See also: Horites.

External Links

• Vyacheslav V. Ivanov, "Comparative Notes on Hurro-Urartian, Northern Caucasian" gives the lay reader an idea of the difficulties and disagreements faced by linguists working in this area
• A bibliography ion Hurrian
• A bibliography ion Urartian
• The Hurran kingdom of Mitanni