The Coming of the Greeks. Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East

Near Eastern History

they also retained the cult of gods who are prominent in the

Vedas: Indra, Mithra, Varuna, and the Nasatya twins were in-

voked by Matiwaza of Mitanni, toward the middle of the four-

teenth century, when making a treaty with Suppiluliumas of

Hatti. At one time it was supposed that the Aryans of Mitanni

spoke Indo-Aryan (as opposed to Irano-Aryan), and that from

India they had come westward to Mitanni, 23 but that no longer

seems likely. A treatise on the acclimatizing and training of

chariot horses, whose author was Kikkuli of Mitanni, contains

a number of Aryan glosses. In her definitive edition of this

text, Annelies Kammenhuber concluded that the Aryan words

came not from the Proto-Sanskrit of India, but from the still

undivided Aryan language. 24 Stated another way, Aryan speak-

ers came to Mitanni before the Aryan-language community was

sundered into its Indian and Iranian components, and so before

the Aryan conquest of northwest India.

The imperial kingdom of Mitanni was destroyed by the As-

syrian Ashur-uballit I late in the fourteenth century B.C., but

when it first appeared is less certain. The list of imperial kings

in Mitanni begins with Shuttarna I, and using the standard

chronology, one can estimate that Shuttarna came to power in

the middle of the sixteenth century. 25 In Mitanni, the Aryan

and Hurrian speakers seem to have been thoroughly fused (the

23. Cf., for example, Gurney, TheHittites, 105.


24. A. Kammenhuber, Hippologia Hethitica (Wiesbaden: Harrasso-
    witz, 1961). Kammenhuber further elaborated the argument in her Die Arier
    im vorderen Orient (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitatsverlag, 1968). On
    page 238 of Die Arier she concludes that the Aryan speakers of Mitanni
    spoke a "noch ungeteiltes Indo-Iranisch = Arisch," but that within that
    language in the seventeenth or sixteenth century there were already several
    dialects. That the Mitanni-Aryans's speech belonged "zum Dialekt der spa-
    ter nach Indien eingewanderten Indien" was indicated, for example, by
    their word for "one" (aika in the Kikkuli text; the word for "one" in San-
    skrit is eka, whereas it is aeva in Avestan).


25. In the first half of the sixteenth century three petty kings in cit-
    ies of Hurri had Indo-Aryan names; see O'Callaghan, Aram Naharaim, 62
    and 64.

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