HURRITI (HURRI). - An ancient Middle Eastern people 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 centre is later Assyria; as a geographical concept, in the 3rd and 2nd millennia B.C. it includes several peoples (among them also the H., inhabitants of that area).
The oldest documents concerning 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 the names of the (Hurrian) god Simiga and of the “goddess of the land Nagar” also occur. This document dates from the 24th/23rd century B.C. 2) Somewhat later, but still before the 3rd dynasty of Ur (2070–1960 B.C.), another tablet in the Akkadian language reports that King Arišen dedicated a temple in the (Akkadianized) land of Hawilum to the “honoured god Nergal,” a Sumerian-Akkadian god. In this text occur the geographical names Urkeš and Nawar. 3) Around 2000 B.C., the name of the “land” and the “mountain” Hur-ru-um occurs in a Sumerian mythological poem. This territory is probably to be located in the region of the Zagros mountains (east of the Tigris). 4) Yet the proper names of the 3rd dynasty of Ur are already composed with Hurrian elements (which later occur in Nuzu), such as ar, haš, tih, nan, šen, etc. Conversely, 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 Amorites (v.), but in the north, at Alalah (Tell Atchana), Hurrian nobles are already found. All this documentation extends more or less down to 1700 B.C.
From 1700 to 1550 B.C. immediate documentation is lacking, but after 1550 the following facts emerge: 1) Assyria was under the H., that is, under the kingdom of Mitanni; 2) east of the Tigris there was a Hurrian centre at Nuzu; 3) in the very capital of the Hittites, Hattušáš (Boghazkóg), many Hurrian gods were worshipped; 4) the H. had advanced from northern Syria as far as Palestine and Edom (e.g., the Horites, Vulg. Horraei: Gen. 36, 20–22; Deut. 2, 12. 22).
Accordingly, there was a first expansion of the H. into Mesopotamia in the 22nd–20th centuries B.C., during which the (Hurrian) god Kumarbi was introduced into the Babylonian pantheon as “king of the gods,” in a period of Babylonian political weakness. 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. constituted the predominant and principal element, but they were not the rulers. These were the Indo-Aryans, especially the marianni, a noble caste of horsemen.
Traces of the H. are still found in the 1st millennium B.C. among the Urarteans (between 900 and 600), between Lake Urmia and Lake Van.
The language of the H. is written in cuneiform, and has the peculiarity of a strange passive construction, so that the scribes of Nuzu in their Akkadian texts from time to time interchange subject and object. The importance of the H. in literature is shown by the “Kuniarbi poem” (preserved in the Hittite language), in reality a cycle of different myths.
As for religion, the gods of the H. (by means of whom Hurrian proper names can, at least in part, be distinguished from others) are Teššub (the storm god), with his wife Hepa (the sun goddess), Simike (the sun god), etc.
In art, many motifs both in glyptic art and in ceramics are now regarded rather as Hurrian than as Hittite motifs.