Fwd: farthest west that an Indo-Ayran people penetrated

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Kings of Mitanni:Copyright © 1999, 2001 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D.

 

This is one of the more obscure and intriguing important kingdoms of

the 2nd millennium BC. One of the ancient non-Semitic and non-Indo-

European peoples of the Middle East, like the Sumerians, Elamites,

Kassites, and Urartuans, the Hurrians briefly come into their own.

Just where they came from is obscure. It tended to be previously

thought that some time after 2000 they moved out of the mountains and

occupied the great bend of the Euphrates River (the Jazirah or

Nahrin) and the upper Tigris Valley. Now (cf. Am�lie Kuhrt, The

Ancient Near East, c.3000-330 BC, Routledge, 1995, 2000, volume I,

pp.284-289), it appears possible that they occupied these areas

originally, all the way down to the environs of Nineveh.

 

Previously, it was thought that, around 1600, an Iranian people, the

Mitanni, had established themselves among the Hurrians as a warrior

aristocracy, founding the Kingdom known by that name. The evidence

for this was Indo-Aryan names of the Kings and the invocation of

Vedic gods: A treaty preserved by the Hittites with the Mitanni King

Shattiwaza has them listing gods named " Mitrasil, " " Arunasil, "

and " Indar, " which are clearly the Vedic gods Mitra, Varuna, and

Indra, the first two simply with " -il, " a Semitic element for " god, "

added. This would have been the farthest west that an Indo-Ayran

people penetrated. Now, however, this evidence apparently seems more

ambiguous than previously thought (cf. Kuhrt, pp.296-297). Hurrian

names, or Hurrianized names, and Hurrian gods (e.g. the storm god

Teshub and Shaushga, the Hurrian equivalent of the Assyro-Babylonian

Ishtar) actually dominate the record that we have. If there had been

a foreign warrior aristocracy, it looks like it was assimilated

rapidly and left few traces by the time of Shattiwaza. This does not

require a very radical rethinking of the situation, however. The Indo-

Aryan influence is unmistakeable. The proximity of durable Into-Aryan

speakers in Iran is obvious. The only question is the extent of the

influence, or of the physical presence of Iranians among the

Hurrians. Such questions are probably now unanswerable.

Characteristic of the obscurity of the history of this kingdom, the

capital, Washukkanni, has never been positively located (now thought

to be Tell al-Fakhariyeh in Syria), leaving us without direct

documentary evidence of Mitannian history from archives or

inscriptions. The dating is thus, even for the period, especially

problematic. And, as the Hurrians themselves were subsequently

assimilated into later linguistic communities, ultimately that of

Aramaic speakers, any evidence of Iranians who might be been

assimilated among them is lost even more absolutely.

 

 

The short history of the kingdom was an important period in the

history of the Middle East. The first kings had to contend with Egypt

at the height of its military power in the XVIII Dynasty. Both

Thutmose I and Thutmose III reached the Euphrates; but the Mitanni

eventually fought the Egyptians to at least a draw, and cordial

relations ensued, including marriages between the courts. About a

century as a Great Power follows. The Hittites, emerging from a

period of confusion, then upset the status quo with a devastating

defeat of Tushratta, setting off a precipitous decline in the

kingdom. Rival claimants for the throne soon enabled Assyria, a

Mitanni vassal for more than a century, to regain her independence,

the Hittites returned to reduce a rump Mitanni state to Hittite

vassalage, and finally the Assyrians swept the kingdom into history,

soon with nothing whatever left to mark the existence of either the

Mitanni or the Hurrians. The Hittites subsequently fought to their

own draw with the Egyptians, and another modus vivendi (now with the

XIX Dynasty), until being swept away themselves, leaving the field

to, of course, the Assyrians.

 

The list of Kings is gleaned from Am�lie Kuhrt [op.cit., p.290],

Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq [Penguin Books, 1964, 1992], and the

Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East, by Michael

Roaf [Facts on File, 1966, 2000, p.133]. The Penguin Atlas of Ancient

History, by Colon McEvedy [Penguin Books, 1967], skips from 1600 to

1300, missing the entire history of Mitanni, but then shows a small

Mitanni Kingdom in 1300, 1200, and 1000, when we can say with some

certainty that it had already been erased by the Assyrians. The main

map is based on the Cultural Atlas and the Historical Atlas of the

Ancient World, 4,000,000-500 BC, by John Haywood [barnes & Noble,

1998, 2000, �1.12].

 

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