Mitanni

The name the Assyrians and Babylonians gave Mitanni, Ḫanigalbat, written ḫa-ni-gal-bat and used throughout the Mesopotamian record where Hurrian and Hittite texts have Mittani. The Assyrian kings who rose as Mitanni declined, Adad-nirari I and his successors, recorded their victories over the kings of Ḫanigalbat, and the title “king of Ḫanigalbat” outlived the kingdom as a claim its conquerors absorbed. The name’s meaning is disputed: the gal element has been read as “great,” yielding something like “Greater Hani,” but no interpretation is secure, and even the reading of the signs is debated.

Ḫanigalbat is the entry that makes Mitanni’s naming so unusual, because it shares nothing with Mittani at all. Where most of this atlas’s entities are known by one name refracted through many languages, Mitanni was known by several genuinely different names at once, and Ḫanigalbat is the Mesopotamian one, as distinct from the kingdom’s own Mittani as it is from the Egyptian Naharina. To an Assyrian scribe the realm across the Khabur was simply Ḫanigalbat, a word he need never have connected to the Mittani of the kingdom’s own letters; the modern student, reading both in the same archives, is left to recognize that the two refer to one vanished state.

The name the kingdom’s own kings used, Mittani (also vocalized Maittani), in the Hurrian and Akkadian documents of the Mitanni court. Tushratta, who ruled in the fourteenth century BCE, styles himself king of Mittani in the long Hurrian letter he sent to the Egyptian pharaoh, the Mitanni Letter, the fullest connected text in the Hurrian language. The name is generally taken to contain a Hurrian element, though the maita- it is sometimes derived from has also been read as Indo-Aryan, fitting the kingdom’s Indo-Aryan ruling class; its precise origin, like much about Mitanni, is unsettled.

Mittani is the endonym at the center of an unusually scattered onomastic field. It is the only one of the kingdom’s several names that its own rulers used and that its neighbors the Hittites also adopted, the shared “international” name beside which the Assyrians’ Ḫanigalbat and the Egyptians’ Naharina stand as wholly separate words. That a Hurrian-speaking, Indo-Aryan-led kingdom should be known to history chiefly by a name of contested language is fitting for a state that sat at the crossroads of three language families and left, in the end, more names than monuments: its capital Waššukanni has never been found, and the kingdom is reconstructed almost entirely from what others wrote about it and the few letters its kings sent abroad.

The Hittite name for Mitanni, written Mi-ta-an-ni, the same name the kingdom used of itself and the one the Hittites set down in the treaties that ended Mitanni’s independence. When Šuppiluliuma I broke Mitanni’s power in the fourteenth century BCE and installed Šattiwaza as a client king, the resulting treaties name the land Mittani, and they are among the most important sources for the kingdom’s last decades. Alongside this the Hittites also spoke of the Ḫurri, the Hurrians, and of the “land of Ḫurri,” a broader term for the Hurrian-speaking world of which Mitanni was the leading state.

Hittite Mittani is the bridge between the kingdom’s self-name and the outside world, the one foreign power that called Mitanni by its own name rather than inventing a separate one. Set beside the Assyrian Ḫanigalbat and the Egyptian Naharina, it shows the kingdom’s naming splitting along the lines of who was speaking: its conqueror to the north used the Mitannians’ own word, its rival to the south an unrelated one, and its correspondent to the southwest a description of its rivers. The same Hittite treaties that fixed Mittani in the record also extinguished the thing it named, so that the Hittite archives both preserve the kingdom’s true name and document the end of the kingdom that bore it.