Hurrian

Hurrian was the language of the Hurrians, a people attested in northern Mesopotamia and Syria from about 2300 BCE and largely vanished by 1000 BCE; it was the spoken language of the kingdom of Mitanni, whose Indo-Aryan ruling class governed a predominantly Hurrian population. With its later relative Urartian it forms the small Hurro-Urartian family, whose wider connections are unsettled; Hurrian is otherwise an isolate, related to no other known tongue of the ancient Near East. It was written in the Mesopotamian cuneiform script, adapted to its own sounds, and at Ugarit also in the local alphabetic cuneiform.

The fullest single Hurrian document is the so-called Mitanni Letter, sent by King Tushratta of Mitanni to the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep III in the fourteenth century BCE and preserved in the Amarna archive; it is one of the longest connected Hurrian texts known and a foundation for the modern recovery of the language. Hurrian cuneiform is notable for marking a vowel o distinct from u, a distinction the ordinary Mesopotamian syllabary did not express. The Hurrians left no securely identified name for their language as such in their own words, though the Mitanni Letter does use the Hurrian adjective ḫurroḫe, “Hurrian, of Ḫurri,” formed on the same root with the relational suffix -ḫe. The modern name “Hurrian” derives from Ḫurri, the name of the people and their land, used both by their neighbors, the Hittites in particular, and, in that adjective, within Hurrian itself. For want of a glottonym, the form given here as the language’s name is Ḫurri, written in the syllabic cuneiform spelling ḫu-ur-ri of the Mesopotamian script in which the language is chiefly preserved.

@misc{onomastikon-hurrian,
  author = {Rajagopal, Shriram},
  title = {Hurrian},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://onomastikon.org/languages/hurrian}},
  note = {Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names}
}