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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Clyde Winters: [QB] djehuti [QUOTE] Correct except for one thing. These were not Hurrians but Mitanni. While the majority of Mitanni spoke Urartu which is a language related to Hurrian, the elite apparently spoke Indo-European. [/QUOTE]Bjarte Kaldhol studied 500 Hurrian names and found that only 5, were Indo-Aryan sounding. Are disputing the research of Dr. Kaldhol? [b] This theory of an Indo-Aryan elite that ruled Mitanni always had some unresolved problems. For instance, only the male members of the ruling dynasty had Indo-Aryan names (e.g, Tasaratha ) and not the queens. But still, the evidence seems quite firm. Then a Norwegian scholar, Bjarte Kaldhol, delivered a series of bombshells on the Indology list. In a remarkable series of posts, starting with this one, he proceeded to show that current scholarship in Hurrian rejects this theory. No one has provided a refutation, so I can only assume that he is correct. Here is a longish quote from one of his posts , more than just the state of affairs, it points to how that might have arisen (the $ is a "th"-like sound, my comments in {}). "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$$u-ra? (not asura) {The point being that seeing Indo-Aryan in these names may simply be reader's bias.} Except for Biriazzana, son of the Hurrian Pai-Tilla, and Purusa father of Hudib-Abu, both Hurrians, nothing is known about their families, I think. They are all men. We have thousands of Akkadian administrative and legal texts from Nuzi, some of them at Harvard. They are full of Akkadianized Hurrian words. I do not remember to have seen any Indo-Aryan Rechtstermini among them. Where is the Indo-Aryan ruling class? This may sound polemical, but I would like to see some facts. Also, I would like to point out that marianni does not mean "Streitwagenkaempfer" {chariot fighter}. It is simply a term denoting a social class - women and children could also be mariannena. There are mariannena who do not even possess a cart or a horse. One might object that this could have been a late development, but that would be speculative. Is marianni really a Hurrianized Indo-Aryan word? Or is it Hurro-Urartean marij-anne, as Diakonoff thought? The other Hurrian social classes and groups are termed haniahhe, ehele, hup$e, unu$$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 where the cat escapes from the bag, as we say in Norwegian. The Hurrians, who were not Aryans, needed successful leadership. {Demonstrating the importance of being Norwegian -- not having a German bias.} 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$$ub is called The Great Lord of Kumme, which is thought to have been located in this area, and other Hurrian deities were connected to Ninuwa, Nagar/Nawar, and Halab, as well as to mountains and rivers in this part of Syria and Iraq. None of the Hurrian kings who are claimed by some to have been Aryans, worshipped Indian or Iranian gods. Their gods are known. They were Syro-Mesopotamian deites, because the Hurrians were a North Syrian people rooted in this country, with very old traditions. In fact, if we turn to page 277 in op.cit., we find an article by Marie-Claude Tremouille, "La religion des Hourrites: etat actuel de nos connaissances", which concludes in the following way (this time translated for the benefit of lurkers, please forgive me if my English does not render the French text as well as it deserves): "The documentation that we possess today shows that the Hurrians venerated the same gods and followed the same religious practices as did the other contemporaneous peoples in the Near East. Pressed to the extreme, one might even be led to ask oneself if there ever was a 'religion of the Hurrians'." But she points to the excavations going on at Urgi$/Urkesh and Nagar (Tell Mozan and Tell Brak) and expresses the hope that they might bring us "quelques lumieres plus vives" {some light and clarity ?}. This is true. The capital of Mittani, Wa$$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. So, it appears that the Indologists were basing their view of Mitanni using scholarship from around World War II. But remember, the Nazis were proponents of a theory of racial superiority of blonde, blue-eyed supermen, Aryans, the originators of the Indo-European family of languages, and carriers of civilization. The Aryans supposedly went around conquering the world, subjugating and civilizing inferior people. Thus, the reading of Indo-Aryan into Hurrian may simply be an artifact of Nazi ideology (innocently and uncritically) adopted by later scholars. Or current Hurrian scholarship may simply be rejecting the Nazi past by stripping out a real Indo-Aryan presence from Mitanni. In any case, it has been a while since scholars of Sanskrit and of Hurrian have spoken to one another. I hope the reader has found this to be a useful digression. Perhaps the reader has an increased appreciation of the difficulty of research in the humanities. "Truth" in the humanities has very different connotations from that in science. What I've quoted from Bjarte Kaldhol does not touch on all the points raised by Mallory; but the arguments on these are similar. If the evidence of Indo-Aryan influence on Hurrian is unclear, then the argument about pre-Rigvedic forms of words found in Hurrian is more a matter of interpretation than of fact. With that understanding, we are in a position to examine why many arguments persist about how the Rig Veda is much older than the consensus view, and why they are not easily dismissed, even if they are wrong. We shall examine these arguments in part III. [/b] http://www.sawf.org/bin/tips.dll/gettip?user=Sawf+Archives&tipid=2654&pn=History&co=0&class=EZine&subclass=History&arch=1 [/QB][/QUOTE]
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