A Vacation Week Short That Is Also A Sacred Spring Contribution: Hurrians, Mitanni, and Owning Land

 I am just back from a cycling vacation in which I finally rode the Okanagan Rail Trail from Kelowna to Vernon. This turns out to be a trick, because between the exquisitely appointed section in Kelowna and the somewhat rougher but eminently ridable section between Lake Country and Vernon that passes through my childhood summer camping grounds, there is an  "unimproved" section that was very rough riding, and quasi-trespassing, as the landholder objects to the transformation of the CN rail right of what through their property into a recreational/highway bypass rail trail. 

It turns out that that the landowner is the Westbank First Nation; the parcel is remediated wetland, and I imagine was classified as reserve land because of seasonal bird hunting, which was ruined by the CN's railbed. The contrast between the all-but unpopulated Okanagan-owned parcel and the stretch approaching Oyama just north of it, in which one lakefront property after another evidently had its own private access across the tracks (at least my family settled for a culvert underpass, never used for its intended purpose of watering livestock) is striking. The Salishan-speaking Okanagans left a clear imprint on the geography that their descendants still occupy, but that doesn't make them any less of a marginalised group. You can draw all the property lines on a map that you want; if you don't have the social power to make them work, they are just lines. 

 

The Khabur River in southern Turkey and eastern Syria is a major tributary of the Euphrates rising just to its east in the curl of the southeastern Taurus massif. Its drainage extends, fan-like, via small and seasonal rivers defining a "Khabur Triangle," a very large portion of the Jazeera region in which rain-fed agriculture is possible, and where the original Arabians were raised. In spite of a more recent focus on the region due to the Syrian Civil War, it has that classic mark of obscurity in the Anglosphere, a Wikipedia article drawn mainly from the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Catholic Encyclopedia. 

By Sémhur, Zunkir, rowanwindwhistler - This file was derived from:Carte du Mitanni.png:OrientePróximoTopográfico.svg:,
 CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=149459053

In the Late Bronze Age, it was the heartland of the Kingdom of Mitanni, part of the constellation of Great Kingdoms in the Amarna period, but subsequently demoted to client status, as any gamer would expect.

https://hist1039-16.omeka.fas.harvard.edu/exhibits/show/marriage-diplomacy--the-power-/item/76

 They're right in the middle, and they're going down! The Mitanni are best known to us from campaign annals from Ashur and Hattusa, and by a clientage treaty with Suppiluliuma I. No Mitanni archives or libraries have been found as yet, and we do not have a  king list. The state was effectively defunct by 1300BC.

So to start with, Hurrian, the Mitanni language is first attested chronologically by a brief inscription of King Tish-atal of the Khabur-bank city of Urkesh,  dedicating a temple to Nergal, cursing anyone who interfered with it, and invoking the protection of the city goddess of Nagar, a more important Khabur-area city, which was renamed at the end of the Old Babylonian period, and the Hurrian god, Shimagar, driver of the chariot of the sun, and probably named for the Sun in Hurrian. Historically it came to our attention with the discovery of a long letter from King Tushratta, too Amenhotep III, which violated international diplomatic protocol by being written in Hurrian rather than Akkadian, for reasons that seemed good at the time, and which gave Nineteenth Century scholars a key to the Hurrian language and also a hint of an Indo-Aryan or Indo-Iranian connection, since "Tushratta" is identifiably Tvaisaratha, "The One [Having] a Charging Chariot," and "Mitanni" is similarly a composite Hurrian/Indo-Aryan phrase. The insistence on the latter is derived from the discovery of a horse-training manual of Kikkuli, "master horse trainer of the land of Mitanni," who, in a mainly Hittite text, uses some language from Indic-branch Indo-European which seems to be narrowed down to Indo-Aryan by the use of aika- for "once." Besides royal and state-focussed place names (the name of the capital, "Wassukanni," also appears to be an Indic-Hurrian composite), the Indo-Aryan influence on the Mitanni is illustrated by the invocation of the gods Mitra, Varuna, Indra, and Nasatya in the clientship treaty already mentioned, rather than the Hurrian gods with whom they are readily syncretised. Finally, gentlemen owing knight service as charioteers are referred to by another hybrid word, "maryannu," at one but not all cities under Mitanni hegemony in the Khabur. 

All of this at one time led to the theory of an "Indo-Aryan" superstrate, and when these things were first put together, the insistence on specifically Indo-Aryan was tied to the Aryan Invasion hypothesis --here are to be discovered the original Aryans, stopping to build an empire on their way to overthrow Harappa. 

Which is odd. The historical linguist might be taxed with finding out what happened to Hittite Akkadian, Sumerian, Kassite, Hethitic, Urartu-Hurrian, and multiple Hurrian-western Semitic hybrids, but there's no mystery about what  happened to the Indic speakers of the region. They're right there! I mean, I guess we can create a mystery by insisting on the Indo-Iranian/Indo-Aryan divide, as the Kurds presumably say something like aiva- for "once" rather than eika, but it seems like a stretch. 

Jozef Brandt, "Kurdish Cavalry on the March"

So the conclusion is that the Mitanni state drew on Indo-Aryan speaking horse breeders for their chariot cavalry. Then as now, it is assumed that the lifestyle (and language) was more of an upland thing, the lower temperatures and more abundant summer pasture being better for raising horses. 

The equestrian/language/army class connections are fairly obvious. What is interesting, and perhaps novel, is my source's insistence on the changing character of family papers and state legal practices during the Late Bronze Age. Amanda Podanyi finds a new focus on royal grants of land, on family insistence on land deed archives, and a refocusing of the royal role on issuing and witnessing land transfers. Again, there is nothing that doesn't seem intuitively obvious here. Once one talks about knight service, one is in the world of "feudal" land grants for the purpose of maintaining the national stud. Raising cavalry horses is a capital-intensive process requiring stable and secure multi-year land usufructs and a great deal of expertise. You cannot be flipping land out from under a dam and her yearling.  

Again, nothing about this is extraordinary. It just occurs to me to point out that knight service never really worked out very well over longer periods in  practice. Subsequent historical experience would very strongly suggest that, several centuries in, that is, at the time of the Late Bronze Age collapse, this system would no longer be able to generate an effective cavalry arm justifying the social costs of an equestrian class. Wiping the board clean and resetting land usage rights according to current usage practices might have become  a very attractive notion by, say, 1171BC.