HURRIANS (HURRI). - A people of the ancient Middle East with its own language (and literature), its own religion and probably also its own art. The term H. therefore expresses a linguistic and ethnographic concept. Subarju, on the other hand, is a geographical name indicating a region whose center is later Assyria; as a geographical concept it comprises over the third and second millennia B.C. various peoples (among them also the H., inhabitants of that zone).
The most ancient documents for the H. are: 1) the tablet of Tisari, king of Urkiš (probably in the region of the Habur river), composed in the Hurrian language, in which also occur the names of the (Hurrian) god Simiga and of the "goddess of the land Nagar." This document is from the 24th/23rd century B.C. 2) A little later, but still before the 3rd dynasty of Ur (2070-1960 B.C.), another tablet in the Akkadian language gives notice of King Arišen who dedicates a temple in the (Akkadianized) land of Hawilum to the "honored god Nergal," a Sumerian-Akkadian god. In this text occur the geographical names of Urkeš and of Nawar. 3) Around 2000 B.C. the name of the "land" and of the "mountain" Hur-ru-um occurs in a Sumerian mythological poem. This territory is probably to be placed in the zone of the Zagros mountains (east of the Tigris). 4) But already the proper names of the 3rd dynasty of Ur are composed with Hurrian elements (which later occur in Nuzu) such as ar, haš, tih, nan, šen, etc. On the contrary, names of this type are not found at the beginning of the 2nd millennium B.C. either in Susa (Elam), or in Mari (where tablets in the Hurrian language were found), or in Syria. Syria in this period is inhabited for the most part by the Amorites (v.), but in the north in Alalah (Tell Atchana) Hurrian nobles are already found. All this documentation goes more or less up to the year 1700 B.C.
From 1700 to 1550 B.C. immediate documentation is lacking, but after 1550 the following facts emerge: 1) Assyria is under the H., that is, under the kingdom of Mitanni; 2) east of the Tigris there is a Hurrian center in Nuzu; 3) in the very capital of the Hittites, in Hattušáš (Boghazköy), many Hurrian gods are worshiped; 4) the H. pushed from northern Syria as far as Palestine and Edom (e.g., the Horites, Vulg. Horraei: Gen. 36, 20-22; Deut. 2, 12. 22).
There was consequently a first diffusion of the H. in Mesopotamia in the 22nd-20th centuries B.C., in which the (Hurrian) god Kumarbi was inserted into the Babylonian pantheon as "king of the gods" in a period of political weakness of Babylonia. Subsequently there was another great Hurrian migration and infiltration between 1700 and 1550, in which Hurrian tribes created the kingdom of Mitanni. In this kingdom the H. constitute the preponderant and principal part, but they are not the rulers. These are the Indo-Aryans, especially the marianni, a noble caste of horsemen.
Traces of the H. are still found in the 1st millennium B.C. in the Urartians (between 900 and 600) between Lake Urmia and Lake Van.
The language of the H. is in cuneiform script, and has the peculiarity of a strange passive construction, so that the scribes of Nuzu in their Akkadian texts from time to time change the subject with the object. The importance of the H. in literature emerges from the "Kumarbi poem" (preserved in the Hittite language), in reality a cycle of different myths.
As for religion, the gods of the H. (by means of which the Hurrian proper names can be distinguished, at least in part, from the others) are Teššub (the god of storms) with his wife Hepa (the goddess of the sun), Simike (the sun god), etc.
In art, many motifs both in glyptic and in ceramics are today considered rather as Hurrian motifs than as Hittite.
Bibliography21 works
Alfredo Pohl