The Coming of the Greekslennia. The "Hurrian" language was neither Semitic nor Indo-
European, nor does it seem to have been related to Kassite or
Hattic. In the middle of the second millennium, Hurrian was
the principal language in the Great Kingdom of Mitanni,
which stretched across the Mesopotamian plain between Nin-
eveh and Carchemish; and in the first millennium, an offshoot
of Hurrian was the language of Urartu, the mountainous coun-
try around and south of Lake Van and Lake Urmia. Wherever
their homeland may have been, Hurrian speakers had already
begun drifting toward the centers of civilization by the Akka-
dian period: at Chagar Bazar, on the Habur River, tablets from
that period include Hurrian names. 2 In the Ur ill period
(2113-2006 B.C.), Hurrians began what Ignace Gelb de-
scribed as "their peaceful infiltration of Babylonia." 3 Soon after
2000 B.C., people with Hurrian names turn up in the Kiiltepe
tablets in Cappadocia, and by the time of Hammurabi, people
whose names were Hurrian (and who presumably spoke Hur-
rian as well as the language of their new home) were numerous
in most of the cities of northern Mesopotamia and eastern
Syria. It is, then, no surprise that by the middle of the second
millennium the Hurrian language was dominant in Mitanni.
This movement of Hurrian speakers, strung out over five or
six centuries, was obviously no "invasion" or Volkswanderung
in the usual sense of that word. Like the amurru who made
their way into Mesopotamia, the "Hurrians" who at this time
moved into central Asia Minor or into the northern arc of the
Fertile Crescent were part of no national movement. As indi-
viduals or as small communities, they were drawn toward a
higher civilization than they had at home (although at the same
time, of course, bringing change to their adopted cities, in the
form of a new language, new gods, and new traditions).
It is possible that still another infiltration, this time involv-
- C. J. Gadd, "Tablets from Chagar Bazar and Tall Brak, 1937-
38," Iraq 7 (1940): 27-28. - I. F. Gelb, Humans and Subarians (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1944), 89.
48