Urartian does not derive from Hurrian, but they are closely related. Hurrian is attested from the late third to the later second millennium, while Urartian is attested during the first millennium bce.
Hurrian is found throughout the Ancient Near East, with texts from Syria, Anatolia, and Egypt. But the Urartian corpus consists almost entirely of the royal inscriptions of the kings of Urartu around Lake Van; the earliest texts date to the end of the ninth and the beginning of the eighth century. Although the Urartian inscriptions are in cuneiform, there is a local Urartian script, called Urartian hieroglyphs, which appears on ceramic objects and at least one clay tablet.
Hurrian scribes developed an ingenious system to try to write native sounds for which there were no signs in Mesopotamian cuneiform (such as /f/ and /z/). In the consistent orthography of the Mitanni chancellery, there is a distinction between voiced (single spelling) and voiceless (double spelling) consonants, the opposite of what happens in Hittite orthography. Hurrian is an agglutinative language like Sumerian. Its morphosyntax follows the pattern of split ergativity in four different syntactical constructions.
Some scholars have stressed the presence of Indo-Iranian or Indo-European words in texts from Mitanni in northern Syria. However, apart from the names of some Indo-Iranian deities in a treaty and the names of some rulers, the bulk of these alleged Indo-Iranian words is properly Hurrian. This is especially important in the case of the term maryannu ‘‘charioteer,’’ which has been regarded by some as related to Sanskrit mdrya - ‘‘young warrior, nobleman,’’ but which is perfectly Hurrian. Furthermore, the technical vocabulary concerning the taming of horses in a Hittite tractate written by a Hurrian may not be Indo-Iranian but pre-Indo-Iranian substrate terms.
World History
