No Aryan gods in Hurrian treaty?

Tue Nov 14 04:07:16 UTC 2000

Dear listmembers,

Some preliminary answers to George's challenge:

Yes, I agree that Annelies Kammenhuber in some respects might have carried
her scepticism too far, but T. Burrow wasn't an Assyriologist. Some kind of
Indo-Aryan influence and contact is obvious, and she saw it and recognized
it. On the other hand, I do not accept Mayrhofer's infectious bias, either,
and his principle of "cumulative evidence" may lead to all kinds of
misconceptions. We need to reexamine the evidence in the light of new
discoveries (and new attitudes!) in order to find out how to interpret it.
For example, the Hittite word used to explain wa$anna (wahnue$$ar, which is
now shown to mean "Umwallung", enclosure, in the important Hurro-Hittite
bilingual found in 1983) may have been wrongly interpreted. According to
Professor Lindeman, the etymology of Hittite wah- is unknown. So, it is an
open question how to interpret wa$anna. I also see that Kikkuli's
tera-wartanna in some discussions (and even by Kammenhuber) is rendered
*tri-vartana. But the -a in t(e)ra cannot be explained away. I thought
tampering with the texts in this way was history.

You may all be assured that I am open to all kinds of objections and am
ready to discuss well defined questions.

Here is a question to you Indologists: What is the etymology of
Parrattarna?

Just to give you an idea of how almost invisible the Indo-Aryans are at
Nuzi and in the whole kingdom of Arrapha:

Among the five or six hundred names indexed in AASOR 16, I could find only
five that have an Indo-Aryan "ring". Less than one percent. They are all
found on two pages out of twenty-three, so, there are twenty-one non-IA
pages. If I ask you to explain these names etymologically, I believe I
shall have to wait ad Kalendas Graecas. Here they are - they can be read in
many more ways than indicated:

1. Parda$sua? Farda$sua? Barda$sua? Farda$swa? Farda$sfa? etc.
2. Biria$$ura? Piria$$ura? Firia$$ura? Friya$$ura?Firya$$ura? Pria$$ura?
3. Biriazzana? (zz = ts?) Piriazzana? Firiazzana?Friyazzana? Priatsana?
4. Purasa (not $), Purusa, Frusa? Purrasa? Prusa? etc.
5. $aima$$ura? $aim-A$$ura? $aima$-$ura? $aima$$u-ra? (not asura)

Except for Biriazzana, son of the Hurrian Pai-Tilla, and Purusa father of
Hudib-Abu, both Hurrians, nothing is known about their families, I think.
They are all men.

We have thousands of Akkadian administrative and legal texts from Nuzi,
some of them at Harvard. They are full of Akkadianized Hurrian words. I do
not remember to have seen any Indo-Aryan Rechtstermini among them. Where is
the Indo-Aryan ruling class? This may sound polemical, but I would like to
see some facts. Also, I would like to point out that marianni does not mean
"Streitwagenkaempfer". It is simply a term denoting a social class - women
and children could also be mariannena. There are mariannena who do not even
possess a cart or a horse. One might object that this could have been a
late development, but that would be speculative. Is marianni really a
Hurrianized Indo-Aryan word? Or is it Hurro-Urartean marij-anne, as
Diakonoff thought? The other Hurrian social classes and groups are termed
haniahhe, ehele, hup$e, unu$$uhuli etc. - all Hurrian words. There are no
traces of an Indo-Aryan administrative language. Did it ever exist? Cord
Kuhne, who in his article in Studies on the Civilization and Culture of
Nuzi and the Hurrian, vol. 10, p. 203-221, "Imperial Mittani: An Attempt at
Historical Reconstruction", starts by stating that "the haphazard and often
ambiguous state of the historic documentation available allows only for an
incomplete picture, resulting in many gaps that can be bridged only by
hypotheses". But he proceeds to write history in a Herodotean vein, without
reference to Hurrian glyptic art, religion, or archaeology, where he would
have found nothing to substantiate claims like these:

"It seems probable that the 'Hurrian troops' meant by our annalistic texts
were drawn from a recent wave of Hurrian invaders who had descended from
the mountainous flanks of northwestern Iran and superseded the older
Hurrian ethnic layers, eventually expanding the territory of settlement...
In support of a fairly recent arrival of a substantial part of these
Hurrians is the convincing theory that their military and political
success, and perhaps even their emigration, was due to the leading role of
a group of Indo-Arians [sic et not aliter]... Perhaps they searched,
together with their new partners, for better homesteads in the lush plains
of Mesopotamia and provided successful leadership..." This is were the cat
escapes from the bag, as we say in Norwegian. The Hurrians, who were not
Aryans, needed successful leadership.

My main objection (besides the curious idea that the steppes of Mesopotamia
were "lush") is that there is nothing to substantiate the massive invasion
envisaged. His linguistic argument - that the Hurrian language changed
after the assumed invasion, is not tenable. In fact, the Akkadian language
changed much more than Hurrian during the six hundred years from 1950 to
1350. Hurrian was spread over a vast area, and there were several dialects,
but no Indo-Aryan influence can be detected either in vocabulary or syntax.
No pure IA words are attested - only Hurrianized ones. Kuhne does not refer
to archaeology and religion, which demonstrate that the holy cities of the
Hurrians were located in the Khabur triangle and in the area east of
Tigris. Te$$ub is called The Great Lord of Kumme, which is thought to have
been located in this area, and other Hurrian deities were connected to
Ninuwa, Nagar/Nawar, and Halab, as well as to mountains and rivers in this
part of Syria and Iraq. None of the Hurrian kings who are claimed by some
to have been Aryans, worshipped Indian or Iranian gods. Their gods are
known. They were Syro-Mesopotamian deites, because the Hurrians were a
North Syrian people rooted in this country, with very old traditions. In
fact, if we turn to page 277 in op.cit., we find an article by Marie-Claude
Tremouille, "La religion des Hourrites: etat actuel de nos connaissances",
which concludes in the following way (this time translated for the benefit
of lurkers, please forgive me if my English does not render the French text
as well as it deserves):

"The documentation that we possess today shows that the Hurrians venerated
the same gods and followed the same religious practices as did the other
contemporaneous peoples in the Near East. Pressed to the extreme, one might
even be led to ask oneself if there ever was a 'religion of the Hurrians'."
But she points to the excavations going on at Urgi$/Urkesh and Nagar (Tell
Mozan and Tell Brak) and expresses the hope that they might bring us
"quelques lumieres plus vives". This is true. The capital of Mittani,
Wa$$ukkanni/U$$ukkanni, has yet to be found. While Tell Brak tells the same
story as Nuzi and Alalah, Wa$$ukkanni might tell another story. But I don't
think it will be THAT different.

Best wishes, and excuse me for this longish outpouring.
Bjarte Kaldhol

----------
> From: George Thompson <GthomGt at CS.COM>
> To: INDOLOGY at LISTSERV.LIV.AC.UK
> Subject: Re: No Aryan gods in Hurrian treaty?
> Date: 14. november 2000 01:22
>
> Dear Bartje,
>
> Shouldn't one confront the counter-arguments of Mayrhofer before
answering
> this question:
>
>  _Die Indo-Arier im alten Vorderasien_ 1966.
>
> _Die Arier im vorderer Orient: ein Mythos?_ 1973.
>
> -- nevermind the rather long list of discussions that have followed?
>
> I cite just one remark, from T. Burrows in _The Sanskrit Language,_ Third
> Edition, 1973, p. 392:
>
> "There is also a detailed discussion of the subject by A. Kammenhuber....
> The work contains valuable discussions, but carries scepticism too far"
>
> Et tu, Bartje?
>
> Best wishes,
>
> George Thompson