Hurrian is a conventional name for the language of the Hurrians (Khurrites), a people who entered northern Mesopotamia around 2300 BC and had mostly vanished by 1000 BC. Hurrian was the language of the Mitanni kingdom in northern Mesopotamia, and was likely spoken at least initially in Hurrian settlements in Syro-Palestine.

Language interrelations

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Hurrian is an ergative-agglutinative language that, together with Urartian, constitutes the Hurro-Urartian family. Some scholars see similarities between Hurrian and the Northeast Caucasian languages, and thus place it in the Alarodian family.

While there is no genetic connection between the ancient Hurrian language and the modern-day Kurdish languages of the same region, there may be Hurrian grammatical influences such as ergativity, and vocabulary items, incorporated into Kurdish^*.

Hurrian writing

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The Hurrians adopted the Akkadian cuneiform script for their own language about 2000 BC. This has enabled scholars to read the Hurrian language. The number of Hurrian texts yet discovered make up only a small number. They also tended use a lot of Sumerian logograms whose Hurrian pronunciation is unknown. The understanding of the Hurrian language is therefore far from complete.

Hurrian literature

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Texts in the Hurrian language itself have been found at Hattusa, Ugarit (Ras Shamra), and Sapinuwa (but unpublished). Also, one of the longest of the Amarna letters is Hurrian; written by King Tushratta of Mitanni to Pharaoh Amenhotep III. It was the only long Hurrian text known until a multi-tablet collection of literature in Hurrian with a Hittite translation was discovered at Hattusas in 1983. Among the Hurrian texts from Ugarit are the oldest known instances of wrtten music.

Hurrian further influenced the Semitic language spoken at Qatna; and the Hittite language, particularly in the dialect of Sapinuwa.

Hypothesis about Hurrian

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Some scholars, like I. J. Gelb and E. A. Speiser, believe that the Hurrians were later arrivals who assimilated or were assimilated by a Subarian substratum, and view the term "Hurrian language" as an anachronistic term for the native language of Subartu.

Ancient languages | Hurro-Urartian languages | Extinct languages of Asia

フルリ語 | Хурритский язык | Hurritiska