Umman Manda and the PIE SpeakersHittites were "the people of Hatti," so one would assume that
the Umman Manda were the "horde from Manda." It has been
suggested that Manda was a conventionalized corruption and
combination of the actual place names—Mana and Madai—of
two lands that lay side by side, some three hundred miles north
of Babylon. 4 Mana, whose inhabitants were called Mannai, was
located around and to the south of Lake Urmia. Madai, next
door, lay southeast of Lake Urmia and southwest of the Cas-
pian. The "Medes" of Assyrian scribes were not yet a nation,
as they have been in histories from Herodotus's time to our
own, but simply the inhabitants of Madai (the name first ap-
pears in texts of the late ninth century). In the seventh and
sixth centuries the old term "Umman Manda" was sometimes
used by Babylonian scribes as a synonym for our "Medes." This
slightly strengthens the possibility that originally Manda was
for the Babylonians a vague designation for faraway lands to
the north and northeast, across the Zagros Mountains. If the
term Umman Manda does mean the "horde from Manda," it
was evidently not a synonym for "PIE speakers." The latter
term defines a people linguistically rather than territorially.
It is possible, however, that in the middle of the second mil-
lennium the people living in Manda, wherever that was, were
PIE speakers. The one leader of Umman Manda who is men-
tioned in texts of the period (the Hittite "The Siege of Urshu")
has the name Za-a-lu-ti, which has been given an Indo-Iranian
etymology. 5 Za-a-lu-ti rendered his military services to the
prince of Aleppo in the second half of the seventeenth century
- In ibid., 8311. I, the authors suggest that such a corruption or
combination might account for the place name "Manda" in the annals of
Sargon II. - Albright, "New Light," 31, passes on P. E. Dumont's interpre-
tation of the name (with Sanskrit parallel). Za-a-lu-ti was one of the gener-
als employed by the prince of Aleppo against the Hittite great king late in
the seventeenth century B.C. Albright suggested that this Za-a-lu-ti may
have been not only an Aryan, but the same man as the "Salitis" who
founded the hyksos Fifteenth Dynasty.
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