The Hurrians

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On the headwaters of the Khabur, where the streams gather before running south into the Euphrates, there stood in the third millennium before the present era a walled city the later world would forget and call by a name it could not read: Urkesh. Its kings dedicated bronze and stone in a tongue that was neither the Sumerian of the southern plain nor the Akkadian of the empire of Sargon — a language built on rules of its own, agglutinative and ergative, fastening suffix upon suffix where its neighbors set word beside word. The people who spoke it had no single homeland and no single king for most of their history. They held a broad arc of upland and plain, and they left their gods in the keeping of others. We call them the Hurrians.

They were not Indo-European, as the Hittites who borrowed from them were; they were not Semitic, as the Akkadians and Amorites and Assyrians about them were. The Hurrian language belonged, with one Iron-Age relative, to a small family standing apart from every great stock of the ancient Near East. To recover the Hurrians at all is to read them across a double remove — through the cuneiform script they took from Babylon, and through the archives of the Hittite kings who copied their hymns and their myths into clay and so, without meaning to, preserved a people who left almost no library of their own.

The people of the upper rivers

The earliest Hurrian traces are slight: lists of names and places from the close of the third millennium, scattered through the records of southern Mesopotamian states that dealt with the north. By the start of the second millennium there are full texts — the foundation deposits of a king of Urkesh, modern Tell Mozan in the upper Khabur, whose endowment to the god Nergal survives in Hurrian. From there the people spread, or were always present, across a wide band: northern Syria, upper Mesopotamia, the foothills running east toward the Zagros, and the southeastern reaches of Anatolia. The World History Encyclopedia calls the Khabur valley “the heart of the Hurrian lands for a millennium,” and the description holds. They were farmers of a fertile crescent within the larger one, a people of small kingdoms and city-states rather than a single nation.

They did not write their own language at first. About 2000 BCE they took up the Akkadian tongue and the cuneiform script for their records, as the whole literate north did, and only gradually bent the borrowed signs to the sounds of Hurrian. Even so the bulk of what survives is short — dedications, ritual instructions, lists of offerings — until one extraordinary document. In the fourteenth century a Hurrian king wrote at length, in his own language, to a pharaoh of Egypt; that letter, recovered in 1887 at Amarna, remained for decades almost the whole corpus of connected Hurrian prose available to scholars, and the slow work of construing it laid the foundations of the grammar.

What changed the standing of the Hurrians in their own age was horses, chariots, and a confederation in the north. Out of the welter of Hurrian principalities there rose, before 1550 BCE, the kingdom the Egyptians knew as Naharin and the Hittites as the land of the Hurri — the kingdom of Mitanni.

Mitanni among the great kings

For roughly two centuries Mitanni was one of the great powers of the Late Bronze Age. Its capital, Washukanni, lay somewhere near the Khabur springs and has never been firmly located. Its kings ruled a confederation that reached at its height from Kizzuwatna in the west across northern Syria to the upper Tigris, governing through vassal princes and provincial governors, and they counted themselves among the handful of “Great Kings” who addressed one another as brothers. Shaushtatar, about the middle of the fifteenth century, is remembered for sacking the Assyrian capital at Assur and carrying off its treasure.

The men at the head of this Hurrian state bore names that were not Hurrian. From Shuttarna I onward the throne-names of Mitanni’s rulers — and a stratum of technical terms in a famous manual of horse-training compiled by one Kikkuli — belong to an early form of Indo-Aryan, the speech of the lineage that elsewhere entered India. Most plainly, a treaty preserved in the Hittite archives invokes, alongside the gods of Mitanni, a row of Indo-Aryan deities: Mitra, Varuna, Indra, and the twin Nasatya. The population spoke Hurrian; a thin chariot-warrior aristocracy, it seems, had carried these gods and these horse-words in from the steppe. That the same divine names stand at the head of the Vedic hymns of distant India is one of the small, exact astonishments of Bronze-Age history.

Map of Mitanni at its maximal extent in the early fifteenth century BCE, heartland in dark purple. Wikimedia Commons, by Zunkir, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Mitanni’s diplomacy with Egypt ran on marriage. A princess named Gilukhipa, and afterward Tadukhipa, went south to the harem of Amenhotep III, sealed by gift-exchange and by the lavish, complaining letters that flowed in both directions. It is one of these — Tushratta of Mitanni writing to the pharaoh about gold and brides and the goddess Šauška of Nineveh, whom he sent on loan to heal the aging king — that the Amarna archive preserves.

Amarna letter from Tushratta of Mitanni to Amenhotep III, Tell el-Amarna, first half of the fourteenth century BCE, British Museum. Photograph by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The end came from the north and the east at once. In the mid-fourteenth century the Hittite king Suppiluliuma I drove through Syria in the campaign his treaties call the Great Syrian War, took Washukanni, and reduced the kingdom to a client. Tushratta was murdered in the collapse; his son Shattiwaza was reinstalled as a Hittite vassal, bound by treaty, while a rump of the old realm fell at last to the rising power of Assyria. Mitanni as a great kingdom was finished around 1300 BCE. But the gods of the Hurrians did not die with it. They went, by another road, into the heart of the empire that had broken them.

The kingship of heaven

At the head of the Hurrian gods stood the storm-god Teššub, lord of the sky’s water and the mountain’s thunder, who rides upon the weather as a king rides to war. His consort in the western, Syrian reach of the Hurrian world was Ḫebat, the great mother-goddess of Halab, queen of heaven; their son was Šarruma, figured as a young god standing upon a panther. About them gathered a wide company: Šauška, the goddess of love and of war and of healing whom the scribes equated with Ištar and who was worshiped, the texts say, across all the Hurrian lands; Kušuḫ the moon, whose seat was at Harran; Šimige the sun. The gods were ranked and listed in the kaluti, the ordered offering-sequences that set each deity in place by rank and divided the company into the male and the female. These lists are not incidental. When the gods of the Hurrians were one day carved in stone, it was the order of the kaluti that governed who stood where.

Above this living cult, and older than any of it, lay the great myth — the Song of Kumarbi and the songs that follow it, the cycle of the kingship of heaven. It tells how the rule of the sky passed down a line of contending gods. First Alalu was king, and reigned nine years, with Anu as his cupbearer. Then Anu overthrew Alalu and reigned, with Kumarbi serving below him. Then Kumarbi rose against Anu, and as Anu fled to the sky Kumarbi seized him, bit through and swallowed his manhood, and so took into his own body the seed of the gods to come. From that swallowing he conceived three powers — the storm-god Teššub, the river Tigris, and the vizier Tašmišu — and could not keep them, and they were born from him, Teššub among them, who in the end would wrest the kingship from Kumarbi as Kumarbi had wrested it from Anu.

Kumarbi does not yield quietly. In the Song of Ullikummi he begets upon a great rock a stone monster, blind and deaf and growing, set in the sea upon the shoulder of the giant Upelluri who holds earth and sky, and the thing grows until it threatens to topple the gods. The storm-god’s first onset fails. It is the clever god Ea, the lord of wisdom, who finds the ancient copper saw with which heaven and earth were once cut apart, and severs the monster from the shoulder that fed it, so that Teššub may at last prevail. Rendered in Hittite translation in the Hattusa archives, this is the oldest written form of a story the world would hear again: the line of sky-kings, each unseating his father, the elder god unmanned, the youngest storm-wielding son who keeps the throne. Greek readers would meet it as the line of Ouranos and Kronos and Zeus in Hesiod’s Theogony, where Kronos castrates Ouranos and is himself displaced by Zeus the thunderer. The structural kinship between the Kumarbi cycle and the Greek succession-myth is a settled matter of comparative scholarship; the route by which the pattern traveled west — through Phoenicia, through the Aegean, through some lost intermediary — is still debated and may never be fixed.

The gods of Hatti wear Hurrian faces

The Hittites had storm-gods of their own. Tarḫunna, the storm-god of Hatti, ruled their pantheon and warranted their kings, and the indigenous gods the Hittites had inherited from the older Hattians — the Sun-goddess of Arinna, the vanishing god Telipinu — kept their places in the state cult through most of the empire’s life. But the Hittite kings married into the Hurrian world and absorbed its theology, and in the last century of their power the absorption became wholesale.

The agent of it was a queen. Puduḫepa, daughter of a Hurrian priest of Kizzuwatna and wife of the great king Hattusili III, brought the gods of her homeland into the center of the realm’s worship, and her son Tudhaliya IV, who reigned in the thirteenth century, gave them a house in stone. He completed the open-air rock sanctuary at Yazılıkaya, a cleft in the rock above the capital where two long files of figures advance toward a meeting. They are the Hurrian gods, named in their Hurrian forms in the hieroglyphic-Luwian labels beside them and ordered as the kaluti ordered them: the goddesses approaching from one wall, the gods from the other, to converge upon the central scene where Teššub, borne upon two bowed mountain-gods, meets Ḫebat, who stands upon a panther, with their son Šarruma behind her.

The meeting of the chief gods, Chamber A at Yazılıkaya, late thirteenth century BCE. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA.

This is the thing worth pausing on. The supreme couple of the imperial Hittite sanctuary are not Hittite gods. They are Teššub and Ḫebat, the storm-king and the mother-goddess of the Hurrians, set at the head of what the texts call the thousand gods of Hatti — the storm-god of the Hittite state addressed under his Hurrian name, his queen a goddess of Syrian Halab, their attendants the moon-god of Harran and the warrior Šauška. In the inner chamber, a relief shows the king Tudhaliya himself held in the protecting arm of the god Šarruma, the Hurrian son of the storm-god, who stands taller than the king and bears him along. The empire that had crushed Mitanni had taken Mitanni’s gods to its bosom, and made them the warrants of its own crown. When the Hittite state fell about 1180 BCE, the gods carved on that rock were wearing Hurrian faces.

Basalt relief of the storm-god, Neo-Hittite, from Carchemish, tenth century BCE, British Museum. Photograph by Szilas, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Afterlife and recovery

The Hurrians as a distinct people thinned away in the Iron Age. Their language fell silent; their populations were absorbed into the Aramaean, Assyrian, and Anatolian worlds that succeeded the Bronze-Age order. But their tongue had one heir. Far to the north, around Lake Van in the Armenian highlands, there rose between roughly 860 and 590 BCE the kingdom of Urartu, whose royal language belonged to the same small family as Hurrian — its nearest relative, sharing a common ancestor rather than descended from it. The Urartians worshiped their own triad under the war-god Ḫaldi, and built fortress and canal across the mountains, until the Medes took their capital at Van about 590 BCE and Urartu passed, by slow continuity, into the emergent Armenian world. With it the Hurro-Urartian family came to its end.

The Hurrians themselves were recovered from the ground and from other peoples’ archives. The decipherment of cuneiform opened the long letter from Amarna; the great finds at Boğazköy — the Hittite capital — in the 1910s, and the texts from Ugarit in the 1930s, supplied the ritual and mythological material, and in 1941 a first full grammar of the language appeared. Later a Hurrian–Hittite bilingual, the so-called Song of Release, gave scholars a rare parallel text in which the same matter stood in both tongues. Piece by piece the people behind the borrowed script came back into view: a folk of the upper rivers, neither of the great language-stocks around them, builders of Urkesh and rulers of Mitanni, who dealt as equals with pharaohs and were broken by kings.

Their largest bequest was made through the hands of others. The gods they carried — the storm-king who wins the kingship of heaven, the elder god he displaces, the whole grave drama of the generations of the sky — these were copied by Hittite scribes into clay that lay buried until the modern age, and the same shape of story surfaced again, by a road still argued over, in the verse of archaic Greece. A people who left almost no books of their own gave the world one of its oldest myths, and left it in another’s keeping.

→ Related: Teshub · Kumarbi · Yazilikaya · Hattusa · Tarhunna · Arinna Sun Goddess · Telipinu · The Luwians · The Hattians · Hittites · Hittite Empire · Mitanni · Urkesh · Urartu · The Assyrians · The Sumerians · Anu · Ishtar · Zeus · Akhenaten · Harran