HURRIAN CULTURE

The Temple at Nuzi

The temple at Nuzi was rebuilt six times after its initial construction at the beginning of the second millennium BCE.   Temple G, the earliest, possessed only one sanctuary, which was apparently dedicated to Ishtar-Shawushka.   A second sanctuary and courtyard were added in the next phase (Temple F).   This sanctuary may have been devoted to Teshshup, the head of the Hurrian pantheon.   Temple A, the latest in the sequence, was ransacked and destroyed with the rest of Stratum II in the late 14th century BCE.

This display is based on features found in the final sanctuary of Ishtar-Shawushka (Temple A).   The statue of the goddess, of which only a few possible fragments survive, would have stood on a pedestal at one end of the sanctuary room.   She is depicted here in her aspect as goddess of war.

Glazed ceramic pegs were embedded into the sanctuary's mud-plastered walls as decoration.   Thousands of beads were found in the sanctuary, and some of these may have adorned the walls as well, Figurines, vessels, and other objects would have been placed at the feet of the goddess and on benches along the walls.

The earliest Hurrians that we are able to recognize were encountered in the late third millennium BCE by the expansionist rulers of southern Mesopotamia.   These Hurrians, who inhabited the northern and northeastern border regions of Mesopotamia, can be identified by their distinctive names.   The exact limits of the area they occupied in this early period cannot be determined.   Nevertheless, the relative rarity of Hurrian names in the texts from the northern Mesopotamian town of Gasur (later in antiquity to be called Nuzi, modern Yorghan Tepe) suggests that it lay to the south of the core Hurrian area in the third millennium.

Two copper lion foundation pegs and a white stone tablet, displayed here in reproduction, record the construction of a temple to Nergal by Tish-Atal, king of Urkesh.   The lions are stylistically related to southern Mesopotamian art of the late third millennium BCE; the tablet can be placed in the same time range.   The copper pegs would have been deposited in the foundations of a temple, whose construction they commemorated.   These objects may in fact have come from Mozan, ancient Urkesh, but because they were not properly excavated, the circumstances of their discovery and their archaeological contexts will never be known.

 King Parrattarna of the Hurrians gained control of Aleppo.   A text inscribed on a statue of Idrimi, Mitannian king of Mukish, was discovered in a temple in Alalakh: "In Halab [Aleppo], in the house of my fathers, a crime had occurred and we fled.   I took my horse, my chariot and my squire and went into the desert [for seven years] until I came, at last, to spend the night before the throne of Zakkar [in Ebla]. The next day I set out for Canaan, and I journeyed there to Amiya, where I found also people from Halab.   When they saw me they recognized me, as son of [Ilimilimma, king of Aleppo, c.   1500] their murdered lord, and so they gathered around me. And so I became king of Alalakh and made an alliance with Halab, and with Pilliya of Kizzuwatna [in Cilicia], and with my own coastal kingdom of Mukish, and I received as well the help and support of the people of Emar." And so Idrimi of Mitanni became the vassal king of the Hurrian Parrattarna.   Mitanni's day was yet to come.

, Building AK.

Historians have already documented the influence of Hurrian deities on the Hittite pantheon.   Kelly-Buccellati believes that the Hittites also borrowed their idealization of dynastic succession from the Hurrians.   From her study of the seal impressions recovered at Tell Mozan, she has identified traits heretofore unknown in third-millennium art.

"The Hurrians incorporated the names of the people they depicted in their seal impressions," she says.   "We assumed this practice began much later.   Furthermore, we can observe a clear dynastic succession from the sealings."

Pointing to a seal impression, she notes that the queen—distinguished by her single braid and hair ornament—holds a royal child on her lap while the crown prince—identifiable by his crown—places his hand on the knee of his father, the king.   "It is unheard of for art of this period to indicate succession by a specific gesture like this," she stresses.

Kelly-Buccellati's voice rises with enthusiasm as she explains that Hurrian motifs seem to insist on naturalistic depictions of animals.   One of her favorites is a stela (see page 4) on which a plowman moves himself forward by pushing on a diagonal with his leg—a new compositional technique, she says, centuries ahead of artists to the south and west.

Thanks to the seal impressions, says Buccellati, "the Hurrians now have names, faces.   We know what they looked like—we know they existed.   The crown prince has a very distinctive face, and it's not a very handsome face, either!"

 Court musicians in the Syrian coastal kingdom of Ugarit performed Hurrian compositions.   Other tablets tell us that Kumarbi, the chief god of the Hurrian pantheon, ruled from the Hurrian capital city of Urkesh.   But after more than 70 fruitless years of searching for its remains, archeologists generally agreed that Urkesh had either been destroyed in antiquity, leaving not a trace, or had never been more than the mythical home of the Hurrian gods.

Two small bronze lions, each inscribed in cuneiform with the oldest known Hurrian inscriptions and probably from the third millennium BC, had been sold at Amuda in 1948; ultimately, the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired them.   The text on each lion translates, "The king of Urkesh built the temple of the lion."

During the nine excavation seasons they have spent at Tell Mozan since 1983, the Buccellati team first demarcated an outer defense wall and a building, nine by 16 meters (29 x 51'), that they believe to be a temple.   A stone ramp leads up to the interior, which is surfaced with a thick, cement-like pavement.   Because there is no evidence of a drainage system, architects presume that the building had a roof; because there is no evidence of columns or post-holes, engineers have concluded that it was a pitched roof.   The building's foundations are of roughly hewn limestone blocks, from which mud-brick walls probably once rose.   A large stone block with a depression in its center appears to have been an altar, and it is this feature, more than any other, that supports the Buccellatis' assertion that the building was in fact a temple.

Translation of the seal inscriptions proved uniquely vexing, not only because the clay impressions are extremely delicate and fragmentary, but also because the script is often reversed.   It was not until Buccellati held one of the impressions up to a mirror that he realized that the cuneiform could be deciphered at all.   Just why the Hurrians at Urkesh produced their seals in reverse—unlike almost every other Mesopotamian cylinder seal for millennia—is, Buccellati says, "the million-dollar question.   This is very odd, and, precisely because it is unique to Urkesh, it is important."

From the beginning of the third millennium, cuneiform was the script that the Sumerians, Akkadians and Hurrians used to write their different languages, just as Arabic script is used to write Arabic, Persian and Urdu today, or Roman letters to write languages as different as English, Turkish and Portuguese.   It is largely cuneiform texts, recovered and translated progressively since the 19th century, that form the basis for the ever-growing body of knowledge about ancient civilizations.

the Hurrians began to appear after 2500 BC in the vast fertile area among the foothills of the eastern Taurus and the Zagros mountains.   Their earliest history, he writes, is known from historical accounts of the Sumerian-Semitic civilizations and the documents of local political entities of the area.   Although both appear in Sumerian-Akkadian cuneiform, "at a very early date the Hurrians began to write their historical records also in their own language," Salvini notes.   "Having entered the cultural sphere of the Mesopotamian civilizations, the Hurrians, from the very start, can be seen to have had a bilingual culture: Sumero-Akkadian and Hurrian.   To this picture of the Old Akkadian period must be added the recent discoveries made by Giorgio and Marilyn Kelly Buccellati at Tell Mozan, with the first documents from the archive of 'Tupkish, King of Urkesh.'"

  The Buccellatis hypothesize that this may indicate a cross-cultural royal marriage with political consequences: Was a Hurrian king married to an Akkadian-speaking princess from the south?

So far, the Buccellatis have excavated only one section of the storeroom and have found that, so far, 123 seal impressions either read "Uqnitum, wife of King Tupkish" or otherwise indicate members of the queen's household.   The Buccellatis conclude from this that goods belonging to the queen were stored in this area, and that the queen owned property in her own right. "Obviously, she wasn't busy sealing jars in her storeroom," Kelly-Buccellati says.   "She had her own servants, and one, the nanny, is even named."

Produce from neighboring farms must have been shipped to the palace, and those goods destined for the queen's larder sealed with her name, much as we might address a package today.   The emphasis on naming Uqnitum as the wife of the king leads Kelly-Buccellati to believe that special status was given to the consort of the king, as opposed to the practice in Ugarit, where the king's mother had special status.   In fact, the Buccellatis have so far found no mention of a queen-mother, nor any evidence of royal polygamy.   Because many of the other seal impressions depict people preparing meals or serving banquets, the archeologists presume that this was a work area, and that the queen's seal stones and her jewelry were stored elsewhere.

Despite political subjection, the continued Hurrian ethnic and cultural presence in Syria and the Cilician region (Kizzuwadna) strongly influenced the Hittites.   The carvings at Yazlkaya, for instance, suggest that the official pantheon of the Hittite Empire was thoroughly Hurrianized; Hittite queens had Hurrian names; and Hurrian mythology appears in Hittite epic poems.Except for the principality of Hayasha in the Armenian mountains, the Hurrians appear to have lost all ethnic identity by the last part of the 2nd millennium BC.  

Spearpoints, daggers, a scraper and a pin of pure copper, as well as samples of low-tin bronzes and copper alloyed with arsenic, have all been recovered at Tell Mozan.