- The approximate area of Hurrian settlement in the Middle Bronze Age is shown in purple
Hurrians — an ancient people that appeared in the territory of northern Mesopotamia in the second half of the 3rd millennium BC and belonged to an unknown language group of the Near East. Known from the 3rd millennium BC in Northern Mesopotamia and along the left tributaries of the Tigris. In Syria and Mesopotamia, they lived intermixed with Semites. In the 16th-13th centuries BC, the Hurrians created the state of Mitanni in Northern Mesopotamia and exerted a strong influence on the Hittite Kingdom. In the 1st millennium BC, they lived in scattered areas along the western, southern, and eastern margins of the Armenian Highlands. Beginning from the end of the 2nd millennium BC, the Hurrians, along with other peoples, participated in the process of the formation of the Armenian people.
To date, there is no precise information about the origin of the Hurrians. It is known that the Hurrians, along with the Akkadians and Urartians, belonged to the Armenoid group of populations. Regarding the Hurrian language, there is a scholarly consensus about its direct connection with the Urartian language. The genetic relationships of the Hurrian language remain unclear; according to S. A. Starostin, it is distantly related to modern North Caucasian (Nakh-Dagestanian) languages. From the end of the 2nd millennium BC to the 4th-2nd centuries BC, the Hurrians, along with the Urartians and some other peoples, participated in the process of the formation of the Armenian ethnos, whose history is a direct continuation of the history of the Hurrians, Urartians, and Luwians.
Small Hurrian kingdoms began to emerge at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC. The most famous of them was the state of Mitanni (17th-13th centuries BC) in the territory of Northern Mesopotamia and adjacent regions. Its capital was the city of Wasshukanni. Mitanni reached its greatest flourishing in the 15th-14th centuries BC. Mitannian culture had a long and strong influence on the culture of Syria, the Asia Minor regions of the Hittite Kingdom, as well as the areas lying northeast of Mitanni, beyond the Tigris. The kings bore Indo-Iranian names; it is possible that the "Hurrianized" dynasty originated from the Iranian Plateau. The Mitannian army possessed a high technique of horse breeding and chariot warfare, which probably allowed the Mitannian dynasty to unite the small Hurrian tribal groups of Mesopotamia and subjugate the Semitic (Amorite-Akkadian) city-states. During its heyday, Mitanni stood at the head of an amorphous union of small kingdoms and city-states from the coast of the Mediterranean Sea and the mountains of the Asia Minor Taurus to the border mountains of Iran. In the 3rd-2nd millennia BC, the Akkadians and Sumerians called the country of the Hurrians Subartu, and its inhabitants Subareans. In the 1st millennium BC, the Hurrian kingdoms disappear, but Hurrian names are still used in Akkadian texts. Then the remnants of the Hurrians apparently dissolve among the Arameans, Urartians, Armenians, Luwians, and Medes. The Kurds, who now occupy part of the territory of the Hurrians, are not their direct descendants; in particular, the Kurdish language is Indo-European and comes not from Hurrian but from the Median language. Therefore, attempts to present the Hurro-Urartian languages as "proto-Kurdish" have nothing to do with science, since the Hurro-Urartian languages not only do not belong to the Iranian group of the Indo-European language family but do not even belong to the Nostratic macrofamily. The reference to the presence of an ergative structure (this phenomenon is partially characteristic of Pashto as well) and a certain number of common isoglosses in Hurrian and Kurdish are too unconvincing, and besides, they may be explained by a supposed Hurrian substrate in the Kurdish language.
The movement of one of the major haplogroups for the Western Caucasus according to "Theorized origins of G2a3a1. Kandell 2009": [G2a2b1] -> [Iraqi Kurds, Armenians, Eastern Turkey] -> [Eastern Anatolian group, Hurrians, Lake Van area] -> [Urartu] -> [Moschi / Meskhi] -> [Transcaucasia before Greek colonizations of 650 BC] [haplogroup names have been changed to their current classification]
VARIANT NAMES: Russian Khuritty, Subarei.
Sources:
Ethnogenesis of the Abkhazians. D.A. Arshba, 2015