Near Eastern Historynately, the takeovers themselves are not documented (presum-
ably they occurred during the hyksos occupation of Egypt). But
records from the Egyptian New Kingdom reveal the situation
in the aftermath of the takeovers. The Amarna letters show
that in the early fourteenth century most of the important cit-
ies of Palestine and Syria were controlled by men with either
Aryan or Hurrian names. At Ugarit the kings have Semitic
names, but their military force includes many men of Hurrian
descent. Among the Aryan princes of Palestine whose doings
are detailed in the Amarna letters, we find an Indaruta as lord
of Achshaph: this kinglet "bears the same Indo-Aryan name as
his contemporary Indrota or Indrauta of the Rig Veda." 17 Ar-
yan names are also attested for the princes of Megiddo (Biri-
diya), Ashkelon (Widia), the Hebron area (Shuwardata), Acre
(Zatatna and Surata), Damascus (Biryawaza), and other places.
The kinglet of Jerusalem has a Hurrian name (Abdu-Heba), as
do several of his colleagues.
Obviously, speakers of Aryan and Hurrian had come to the
Levant, but it is just as obvious that we are not dealing here
with a Volkswanderung or even with an infiltration similar to
those described a few pages earlier. Of the general population
of the Levant in the fourteenth century B.C., so far as can be
gathered from documents such as legal tablets, some 90 per-
cent had Semitic names, and men with Hurrian or Aryan
names are seldom to be found outside the palace or the army.
The foreign princes belonged to, or relied upon, groups of men
called maryannu in the Akkadian texts. These maryannu con-
stituted a prestigious military class in both the Levant and Mi-
tanni. (The plural "maryannu" attaches a Hurrian suffix to the
singular marya, identical to Sanskrit marya, which meant
"young warrior."' 8 )
- For the letter and the commentary, see ANET, 484 and n. 3 on
the same page (translation and notes by W. F. Albright, G. Mendenhall,
and W. Moran). - R. T. O'Callaghan, "New Light on the maryannu as Chariot-
Warriors, " Jahrbuch fur kleinasiatische Forschung i (1950):