HURRIANS

   A people originating from the south Caucasus region who settled along the northeastern borders of Mesopotamia and southern Anatolia in the last quarter of the third millennium B.C. Their language is not related to any of the other known groups of languages. It was agglutinative, which means that chains of suffixes and infixes were added to generally monosyllabic stem words to create meaning. It is not well known, since only relatively few texts were rendered in a cuneiform system of writing, either in Hittite or Mesopotamian contexts.

   Hurrian personal names were already recorded in the texts from the Akkad period, and Hurrians were present in all parts of the Near East for most of the second and first millennia, especially in southeast Anatolia, northern Mesopotamia, and eastern Iran. They achieved the greatest political importance between 1500 and 1200, within the framework of a kingdom called Mitanni where an IndoEuropean elite exercised political control. After the demise of Mitanni, smaller Hurrian principalities survived for a while in Upper Mesopotamia.

   Hurrian influence was particularly strong in religious matters. They are also thought to have brought various Mesopotamian ritual practices to the Hittite realm, where Hurrian magicians enjoyed high esteem. Most of the information concerning their social practices and legal norms comes from archives discovered at the site of the city of Nuzi.