HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

History of the language and its speakers

Hurrian is an ancient Near Eastern language widely spoken in the northern parts of the Fertile Crescent (present-day northern Iraq, northern Syria, southeast Turkey) from at least the last quarter of the third millennium BC on until the end of the second millennium BC. It survived for another half millennium in small pockets in the mountainous areas north of ancient Assyria.

A cognate language of Hurrian is Urartian (see Ch. 10) which is attested in texts from the late ninth to the late seventh century BC. Apart from Urartian, Hurrian is an isolated language without a genetic relation to any other known ancient Near Eastern language. A genetic relation between (reconstructed) Proto-Urarto-Hurrian and (reconstructed) Northeast Caucasian has been argued for, but it is not generally accepted. If the connection could be demonstrated, it would be a rather distant one.

Hurrian is first attested in a few words and personal or place names mentioned in Akkadian texts of the Akkade period (twenty-third to twenty-second centuries BC). The term Old Hurrian (herein abbreviated OH) has been coined for the language of a royal inscription most likely to be dated to the Ur III period (twenty-first to twentieth centuries BC), but it is also used for the more archaic dialect(s) of the second millennium.