Hurrian is an extinct Hurro-Urartian language spoken by the Hurrians (Khurrites), a people who entered northern Mesopotamia around 2300 BC and had mostly vanished by 1000 BC. Hurrian was the language of the Mitanni kingdom in northern Mesopotamia and was likely spoken at least initially in Hurrian settlements in modern-day Syria .
83-516: The Murašû Archive is a collection of cuneiform tablets, excavated between 1888 and 1900, from the ruins of Nippur in central Babylonia . Named after the chief member of a single family, the Murašû Archive is a collection of business records that spans four generations. Assembled during the reigns of the Persian kings Artaxerxes I , Darius II , and Artaxerxes II , the Murašû Archive provides
166-416: A , /f/ becomes diphthongised to /u/, e.g. tānōšau (<*tān-ōš-af)) "I did". /s/ is traditionally transcribed by /š/, because the cuneiform script adapted the sign indicating /š/ for this phoneme. /ts/ is regularly transcribed by z , and /x/ by ḫ or h . In Hurrian, /r/ and /l/ do not occur at the beginning of a word. Vowels, just like consonants, can be either long or short. In the cuneiform script, this
249-500: A certain order. The resulting "morpheme chain" is as follows: Note: (SA) indicates morphemes added through Suffixaufnahme , described below. These elements are not all obligatory, and in fact a noun can occur as a single root followed by nothing except zero-suffixes for case and number. Despite the general agglutinative structure of the language, the plural marker (5) merges with the case morphemes (6) in ways which do not seem to be entirely predictable, so singular and plural forms of
332-401: A completely unknown writing system in 19th-century Assyriology . It was successfully deciphered by 1857. The cuneiform script changed considerably over more than 2,000 years. The image below shows the development of the sign SAĜ "head" (Borger nr. 184, U+12295 𒊕 ). Stages: The cuneiform script was developed from pictographic proto-writing in the late 4th millennium BC, stemming from
415-456: A few Hurrian ones. This stem-final vowel disappears when certain endings are attached to it, such as case endings that begin with a vowel, certain derivational suffixes, or the article suffix. Examples: kāz-ōš (like a cup) from kāzi (cup), awarra (the fields) from awari (field). A minority of Hurrian noun roots have athematic stem vowels, such as šen (brother) in the forms šena and -šenni , mad (wisdom; later becomes i -stem in
498-559: A given sign could have various meanings depending on context. The sign inventory was reduced from some 1,500 signs to some 600 signs, and writing became increasingly phonological . Determinative signs were re-introduced to avoid ambiguity. Cuneiform writing proper thus arises from the more primitive system of pictographs at about that time, labeled the Early Bronze Age II epoch by historians. The earliest known Sumerian king, whose name appears on contemporary cuneiform tablets,
581-582: A language structure typical of the non-Indo-European agglutinative Sumerian language . The first tablets using syllabic elements date to the Early Dynastic I–II periods c. 2800 BC , and they are agreed to be clearly in Sumerian. This is the time when some pictographic element started to be used for their phonetic value, permitting the recording of abstract ideas or personal names. Many pictographs began to lose their original function, and
664-422: A large number of suffixes could be attached to existing stems to form new words. For example, attardi (ancestor) from attai (father), futki (son) from fut (to beget), aštohhe (feminine) from ašti (woman). Hurrian also provided many verbal suffixes, which often changed the valency of the verb they modify. The nominal morphology of Hurrian employs numerous suffixes and/or enclitics, which always follow
747-445: A noun in the genitive modifying another noun, in which case the following nouns takes a possessive pronoun. šēniffufenefe šēn-iffu-fe-ne-fe brother-my- GEN . SG - ART . SG - GEN . SG ōmīnīfe ōmīni-i-fe land-his- GEN . SG šēniffufenefe ōmīnīfe šēn-iffu-fe-ne-fe ōmīni-i-fe brother-my-GEN.SG-ART.SG-GEN.SG land-his-GEN.SG "of the land of my brother" (lit, "of my brother his land") The phenomenon
830-659: A phonetic complement. Yet even in those days, the Babylonian syllabary remained a mixture of logographic and phonemic writing. Elamite cuneiform was a simplified form of the Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform, used to write the Elamite language in the area that corresponds to modern Iran from the 3rd millennium BC to the 4th century BC. Elamite cuneiform at times competed with other local scripts, Proto-Elamite and Linear Elamite . The earliest known Elamite cuneiform text
913-432: A pointed stylus, sometimes called "linear cuneiform". Many of the early dynastic inscriptions, particularly those made on stone, continued to use the linear style as late as circa 2000 BC. In the mid-3rd millennium BC, a new wedge-tipped stylus was introduced which was pushed into the clay, producing wedge-shaped cuneiform. This development made writing quicker and easier, especially when writing on soft clay. By adjusting
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#1732773145882996-483: A resemblance to Old Japanese , written in a Chinese-derived script, where some of these Sinograms were used as logograms and others as phonetic characters. This "mixed" method of writing continued through the end of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, although there were periods when "purism" was in fashion and there was a more marked tendency to spell out the words laboriously, in preference to using signs with
1079-548: A sharpened reed stylus or incised in stone. This early style lacked the characteristic wedge shape of the strokes. Most Proto-Cuneiform records from this period were of an accounting nature. The proto-cuneiform sign list has grown, as new texts are discovered, and shrunk, as variant signs are combined. The current sign list is 705 elements long with 42 being numeric and four considered pre-proto-Elamite. Certain signs to indicate names of gods, countries, cities, vessels, birds, trees, etc., are known as determinatives and were
1162-576: A slightly different way. From the 6th century, the Akkadian language was marginalized by Aramaic , written in the Aramaic alphabet , but Akkadian cuneiform remained in use in the literary tradition well into the times of the Parthian Empire (250 BC–226 AD). The last known cuneiform inscription, an astronomical text, was written in 75 AD. The ability to read cuneiform may have persisted until
1245-620: A stylus. Writing is first recorded in Uruk , at the end of the 4th millennium BC, and soon after in various parts of the Near-East . An ancient Mesopotamian poem gives the first known story of the invention of writing : Because the messenger's mouth was heavy and he couldn't repeat [the message], the Lord of Kulaba patted some clay and put words on it, like a tablet. Until then, there had been no putting words on clay. The cuneiform writing system
1328-552: A voiced consonant is written in these situations, i.e. b (for p ), d (for t ), g (for k ), v (for f ) or ž (for š ), and, very rarely, ǧ (for h , ḫ ). All consonants except /w/ and /j/ can be long or short. The long ( geminate ) consonants occur only between vowels. In the cuneiform, as in the Latin transcription, geminated consonants are indicated by doubling the corresponding symbol, so ...VC-CV.. . Short consonants are written ...V-CV... , for example mānnatta ("I am")
1411-428: Is Enmebaragesi of Kish (fl. c. 2600 BC ). Surviving records became less fragmentary for following reigns and by the arrival of Sargon, it had become standard practice for each major city-state to date documents by year-names, commemorating the exploits of its king. Geoffrey Sampson stated that Egyptian hieroglyphs "came into existence a little after Sumerian script , and, probably, [were] invented under
1494-561: Is a treaty between Akkadians and the Elamites that dates back to 2200 BC. Some believe it might have been in use since 2500 BC. The tablets are poorly preserved, so only limited parts can be read, but it is understood that the text is a treaty between the Akkad king Nāramsîn and Elamite ruler Hita , as indicated by frequent references like "Nāramsîn's friend is my friend, Nāramsîn's enemy is my enemy". The most famous Elamite scriptures and
1577-597: Is an adaptation of the Old Assyrian cuneiform of c. 1800 BC to the Hittite language and was used from the 17th until approximately the 13th century BC. More or less the same system was used by the scribes of the Hittite Empire for two other Anatolian languages , namely Luwian (alongside the native Anatolian hieroglyphics ) and Palaic , as well as for the isolate Hattic language . When the cuneiform script
1660-429: Is called gunû or "gunification"; if signs are cross-hatched with additional Winkelhaken , they are called šešig ; if signs are modified by the removal of a wedge or wedges, they are called nutillu . "Typical" signs have about five to ten wedges, while complex ligatures can consist of twenty or more (although it is not always clear if a ligature should be considered a single sign or two collated, but distinct signs);
1743-484: Is indicated by placing an additional vowel symbol between the CV and VC syllables, giving CV-V-VC . Short vowels are indicated by a simple CV-VC pairing. In the Latin transcription, long vowels are indicated with a macron, ā , ē , ī , ō , and ū . For /o/, which is absent in the Sumerian script, the sign for U is used, whereas /u/ is represented by Ú . While Hurrian could not combine multiple stems to form new stems,
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#17327731458821826-462: Is related to " Sino-Caucasian ". However, none of these proposals are generally accepted. The earliest Hurrian text fragments consist of lists of names and places from the end of the third millennium BC. The first full texts date to the reign of king Tish-atal of Urkesh , at the start of the second millennium BC, and were found on a stone tablet accompanying the Hurrian foundation pegs known as
1909-510: Is written ma-a-a n-n a-a t-t a . Since /f/ was not found in the Sumerian cuneiform script, the Hurrians used the symbols representing /p/, /b/ or /w/. An /f/ can be recognised in words where this transcription varies from text to text. In cases where a word occurs only once, with a p , it cannot be known if it was originally meant to represent a /p/ or an /f/. In final syllables containing
1992-458: The Iron Age (c. 10th to 6th centuries BC), Assyrian cuneiform was further simplified. The characters remained the same as those of Sumero-Akkadian cuneiforms, but the graphic design of each character relied more heavily on wedges and square angles, making them significantly more abstract: Babylonian cuneiform was simplified along similar lines during that period, albeit to a lesser extent and in
2075-776: The Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin , the Louvre , the Istanbul Archaeology Museums , the National Museum of Iraq , the Yale Babylonian Collection (approx. 40,000), and Penn Museum . Most of these have "lain in these collections for a century without being translated, studied or published", as there are only a few hundred qualified cuneiformists in the world. The decipherment of cuneiform began with
2158-531: The Winkelhaken impressed vertically by the tip of the stylus. The signs exemplary of these basic wedges are: Except for the Winkelhaken , which has no tail, the length of the wedges' tails could vary as required for sign composition. Signs tilted by about 45 degrees are called tenû in Akkadian, thus DIŠ is a vertical wedge and DIŠ tenû a diagonal one. If a sign is modified with additional wedges, this
2241-460: The direct object in antipassive constructions (where the transitive subject receives the absolutive case instead of the ergative), and, in the variety of Nuzi , also the dative. In Hurrian, the function of the so-called " article " is not entirely clear, inasmuch as its use does not seem to resemble closely a typical definite article . It is attached directly to the noun, but before any case endings, e.g. tiwē-na-še (object. art . gen.pl ) (of
2324-458: The equative case , has a different form in both of the main dialects. In Hattusha and Mari, the usual ending is -oš , termed equative I, whereas in the Mitanni letter we find the form -nna , called equative II. Another case, the so-called 'e-case', is very rare, and carries a genitive or allative meaning. Like many languages in the region, Hurrian is an ergative language, which means that
2407-577: The "Urkish lions". Archeologists have discovered the texts of numerous spells, incantations, prophecies and letters at sites including Hattusha , Mari , Tuttul , Babylon , Ugarit and others. Early study of the language, however, was entirely based on the Mitanni letter , found in 1887 at Amarna in Egypt, written by the Hurrian king Tushratta to the pharaoh Amenhotep III . The Hurro-Urartian relation
2490-401: The 23rd century BC ( short chronology ). The Akkadian language being East Semitic , its structure was completely different from Sumerian. The Akkadians found a practical solution in writing their language phonetically, using the corresponding Sumerian phonetic signs. Still, many of the Sumerian characters were retained for their logographic value as well: for example the character for "sheep"
2573-408: The 24th century BC onward and make up the bulk of the cuneiform record. Akkadian cuneiform was itself adapted to write the Hittite language in the early second millennium BC . The other languages with significant cuneiform corpora are Eblaite , Elamite , Hurrian , Luwian , and Urartian . The Old Persian and Ugaritic alphabets feature cuneiform-style signs; however, they are unrelated to
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2656-509: The 3rd millennium Sumerian script. Ugaritic was written using the Ugaritic alphabet , a standard Semitic style alphabet (an abjad ) written using the cuneiform method. Between half a million and two million cuneiform tablets are estimated to have been excavated in modern times, of which only approximately 30,000 –100,000 have been read or published. The British Museum holds the largest collection (approx. 130,000 tablets), followed by
2739-480: The Akkadian period, at the time of the Uruk ruler Lugalzagesi (r. c. 2294–2270 BC). The vertical style remained for monumental purposes on stone stelas until the middle of the 2nd millennium. Written Sumerian was used as a scribal language until the first century AD. The spoken language died out between about 2100 and 1700 BC. The archaic cuneiform script was adopted by the Akkadian Empire from
2822-570: The Mitanni letter differs significantly from that used in the texts at Hattusha and other Hittite centres, as well as from earlier Hurrian texts from various locations. The non-Mitanni letter varieties, while not entirely homogeneous, are commonly subsumed under the designation Old Hurrian . Whereas in Mitanni the vowel pairs i / e and u / o are differentiated, in the Hattusha dialect they have merged into i and u respectively. There are also differences in morphology, some of which are mentioned in
2905-481: The Mitanni provincial capital of Arrapha . As can be seen from the table, Hurrian did not possess a voiced - voiceless distinction. There is no voiced consonant with an unvoiced counterpart, nor vice versa. However, based on evidence from the cuneiform script, there seem to have been voiced allophones of consonants other than /ts/, which occurred in certain environments: between two voiced phonemes (sonorants or vowels), and, surprisingly, also word-finally. Sometimes
2988-548: The Old Persian text. Because Elamite is unlike its neighboring Semitic languages , the script's decipherment was delayed until the 1840s. Elamite cuneiform appears to have used far fewer signs than its Akkadian prototype and initially relied primarily on syllabograms, but logograms became more common in later texts. Many signs soon acquired highly distinctive local shape variants that are often difficult to recognise as related to their Akkadian prototypes. Hittite cuneiform
3071-525: The Persians by Greek writers such as Herodotus show how the armies and practices of the Persians left a very real impression on the western world and shape the classical western view of Asia. Cuneiform Cuneiform is a logo - syllabic writing system that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East . The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until
3154-471: The Sumerian signs of the terms in question, added as a guide for the reader. Proper names continued to be usually written in purely "logographic" fashion. The first inscribed tablets were purely pictographic, which makes it technically difficult to know in which language they were written. Different languages have been proposed, though usually Sumerian is assumed. Later tablets dating after c. 2900 BC start to use syllabic elements, which clearly show
3237-523: The Sumerians was not intuitive to Semitic speakers. From the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age (20th century BC), the script evolved to accommodate the various dialects of Akkadian: Old Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian. At this stage, the former pictograms were reduced to a high level of abstraction, and were composed of only five basic wedge shapes: horizontal, vertical, two diagonals and
3320-536: The beginning of the Common Era . Cuneiform scripts are marked by and named for the characteristic wedge-shaped impressions ( Latin : cuneus ) which form their signs . Cuneiform is the earliest known writing system and was originally developed to write the Sumerian language of southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq ). Over the course of its history, cuneiform was adapted to write a number of languages in addition to Sumerian. Akkadian texts are attested from
3403-414: The beginning, similar-sounding words such as "life" [til] and "arrow" [ti] were written with the same symbol (𒋾). As a result, many signs gradually changed from being logograms to also functioning as syllabograms , so that for example, the sign for the word "arrow" would become the sign for the sound "ti". Syllabograms were used in Sumerian writing especially to express grammatical elements, and their use
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3486-474: The case endings are usually listed separately. The anaphoric marker (7) is formally identical to the article and anchors the Suffixaufnahme suffixes (8) and (9). While the absolutive pronoun clitics (10) attached to a noun are not necessarily connected to it syntactically, typically designating the object or intransitive subject of a nearby verb, the third plural pronoun clitic -lla can be used to signal
3569-431: The compound IGI.A (𒅆𒀀) – "eye" + "water" – has the reading imhur , meaning "foam"). Several symbols had too many meanings to permit clarity. Therefore, symbols were put together to indicate both the sound and the meaning of a symbol. For instance, the word 'raven' (UGA) had the same logogram (𒉀) as the word 'soap' (NAGA), the name of a city (EREŠ), and the patron goddess of Eresh (NISABA). To disambiguate and identify
3652-425: The course of the exposition below. Nonetheless, it is clear that these represent dialects of one language. Another Hurrian dialect is likely represented in several texts from Ugarit, but they are so poorly preserved that little can be said about them, save that spelling patterns used elsewhere to represent Hurrian phonemes are virtually ignored in them. There was also a Hurrian-Akkadian creole, called Nuzi , spoken in
3735-447: The cuneiform logo-syllabary proper. The latest known cuneiform tablet dates to 75 AD. Cuneiform was rediscovered in modern times in the early 17th century with the publication of the trilingual Achaemenid royal inscriptions at Persepolis ; these were first deciphered in the early 19th century. The modern study of cuneiform belongs to the ambiguously named field of Assyriology , as the earliest excavations of cuneiform libraries – in
3818-514: The decipherment of Old Persian cuneiform in 1836. The first cuneiform inscriptions published in modern times were copied from the Achaemenid royal inscriptions in the ruins of Persepolis , with the first complete and accurate copy being published in 1778 by Carsten Niebuhr . Niebuhr's publication was used by Grotefend in 1802 to make the first breakthrough – the realization that Niebuhr had published three different languages side by side and
3901-497: The development of Egyptian hieroglyphs, with the suggestion the former influenced the latter. But given the lack of direct evidence for the transfer of writing, "no definitive determination has been made as to the origin of hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt". Others have held that "the evidence for such direct influence remains flimsy" and that "a very credible argument can also be made for the independent development of writing in Egypt..." Early cuneiform inscriptions were made by using
3984-446: The early Achaemenid rulers from the 6th century BC down to the 4th century BC. Because of its simplicity and logical structure, the Old Persian cuneiform script was the first to be deciphered by modern scholars, starting with the accomplishments of Georg Friedrich Grotefend in 1802. Various ancient bilingual or trilingual inscriptions then permitted to decipher the other, much more complicated and more ancient scripts, as far back as to
4067-644: The end of the Mitanni empire, which was divided between the two conquering powers. In the following century, attacks by the Sea Peoples brought a swift end to the last vestiges of the Hurrian language. It is around this time that other languages, such as the Hittite language and the Ugaritic language also became extinct, in what is known as the Bronze Age collapse . In the texts of these languages, as well as those of Akkadian or Urartian, many Hurrian names and places can be found. Renewed interest in Hurrian
4150-404: The final /i/, an epenthetic vowel /u/ is inserted between them, e.g. hafur u n-ne-ta (heaven- art - all.sg , to heaven), the stem of which is hafurni (heaven). One prominent feature of Hurrian is the phenomenon of Suffixaufnahme , or suffix absorption, which it shares with Urartian and the geographically proximate Kartvelian languages . In this process, the dependent modifiers of a noun share
4233-689: The firm. In addition, the Murašû firm converted the produce from the lands they managed into specie—silver ., which was lent on the basis of real security, or collateral. The Murašû firm provides a greater insight into the economic strength and stability of the Persian-ruled provinces. Marc Van De Mieroop argues that, through such business practices as the Murašû firm, the Persians were able to draw upon their resources throughout their provinces and vassal states to pull together enormous armies with which to intimidate and conquer their enemies. Descriptions of
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#17327731458824316-501: The form madi ), and muž (divine name). Some names of gods, heroes, persons, and places are also athematic, e.g. Teššob (Teššobi/a), Gilgaamiž, Hurriž (later Hurri). These nouns seem to occur more frequently in the earliest Hurrian texts (end of the third millennium BC ). Note: This type of thematic stem vowel is completely different in function to Indo-European stem vowels. For a discussion of those, see here and here . Hurrian has 13 cases in its system of declension. One of these,
4399-444: The genitive and dative endings merges with a preceding p or t giving pp and tt respectively, e.g. Teššuppe (of Teššup), Hepat-te (of Hepat). The associative can be combined with the instrumental, as in šēna-nn-ae (brother- ass-instr ), meaning 'brotherly'. The so-called essive case can convey the meaning "as" and a condition, but also to express direction, the aim of a demand, the transition from one condition to another,
4482-413: The influence of the latter", and that it is "probable that the general idea of expressing words of a language in writing was brought to Egypt from Sumerian Mesopotamia". There are many instances of Egypt-Mesopotamia relations at the time of the invention of writing, and standard reconstructions of the development of writing generally place the development of the Sumerian proto-cuneiform script before
4565-478: The largest and most illuminating view into the business activities and conditions of Persian-ruled Babylonia during the last hundred and fifty years of the Achaemenid kingship. In a series of excavations directed by John Henry Haynes , the Murašû Archive was discovered six meters under a mound on the floor of a small room. The original collection comprised 330 whole tablets, 400 or more damaged tablets and fragments, and 20 small clay tags with seal impressions. After
4648-407: The ligature KAxGUR 7 consists of 31 strokes. Most later adaptations of Sumerian cuneiform preserved at least some aspects of the Sumerian script. Written Akkadian included phonetic symbols from the Sumerian syllabary , together with logograms that were read as whole words. Many signs in the script were polyvalent, having both a syllabic and logographic meaning. The complexity of the system bears
4731-518: The lord of Hawalum, Atal-shen, the caring shepherd, the king of Urkesh and Nawar, the son of Sadar-mat the king, is the builder of the temple of Nergal, the one who overcomes opposition. Let Shamash and Ishtar destroy the seeds of whoever removes this tablet. Shaum-shen is the craftsman. In the thirteenth century BC, invasions from the west by the Hittites and the south by the Assyrians brought
4814-443: The meaning and the other the pronunciation (e.g. 𒅗 ka 'mouth' was combined with the sign 𒉣 nun 'prince' to express the word 𒅻 nundum , meaning 'lip', formally KA×NUN; cf. Chinese phono-semantic compounds ). Another way of expressing words that had no sign of their own was by so-called 'Diri compounds' – sign sequences that have, in combination, a reading different from the sum of the individual constituent signs (for example,
4897-567: The mid-19th century – were in the area of ancient Assyria . An estimated half a million tablets are held in museums across the world, but comparatively few of these are published . The largest collections belong to the British Museum ( approx. 130,000 tablets), the Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin , the Louvre , the Istanbul Archaeology Museums , the National Museum of Iraq , the Yale Babylonian Collection ( approx. 40,000 tablets), and Penn Museum . Writing began after pottery
4980-468: The near eastern token system used for accounting. The meaning and usage of these tokens is still a matter of debate. These tokens were in use from the 9th millennium BC and remained in occasional use even late in the 2nd millennium BC. Early tokens with pictographic shapes of animals, associated with numbers, were discovered in Tell Brak , and date to the mid-4th millennium BC. It has been suggested that
5063-515: The noun's case suffixes. Between the suffix of the dependent noun and the case ending comes the article, which agrees with the referent in number, for example, with an adjective: ḫurwoḫḫeneš ḫurw-oḫḫe-ne-š Hurrian- ADJ - ART . SG - ERG . SG ōmīnneš ōmīn-ne-š land- ADJ - ART . SG - ERG . SG ḫurwoḫḫeneš ōmīnneš ḫurw-oḫḫe-ne-š ōmīn-ne-š Hurrian-ADJ-ART.SG-ERG.SG land-ADJ-ART.SG-ERG.SG "the Hurrian land" Suffixaufnahme also occurs with other modifiers, such as
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#17327731458825146-437: The objects). The article is unmarked in the absolutive singular – e.g. kāzi 'cup'. The /n/ of the article merges with a preceding /n/, /l/ or /r/ giving /nn/, /ll/ and /rr/ respectively, e.g. ēn-na (the gods), ōl-la (the others), awar-ra (the fields). In these cases, the stem-final vowel /i/ has been dropped; the singulars of these words are ēni (god), ōli (another), awari (field). If there are two consonants preceding
5229-477: The ones that ultimately led to its decipherment are the ones found in the trilingual Behistun inscriptions , commissioned by the Achaemenid kings. The inscriptions, similar to that of the Rosetta Stone 's, were written in three different writing systems. The first was Old Persian , which was deciphered in 1802 by Georg Friedrich Grotefend . The second, Babylonian cuneiform, was deciphered shortly after
5312-584: The original discovery, a portion of the tablets was shipped to Istanbul for analysis, where Hermann Vollrat Hilprecht first identified the texts as records of a late Babylonian business house called “Murašû Sons of Nippur”. Over the years, the Murašû Archive was scattered around the world, to museums and private collections in London , Istanbul, Philadelphia , Jena , and California . The Murašû Archive comprises business records regarding legal issues, loans, rents, transactions, trips to various capital cities, and
5395-472: The plural of the host noun in the absolutive. Almost all Hurrian nouns end in a vowel, known as a thematic vowel or stem vowel . This vowel will always appear on the word, and will not switch between types. Most nouns end with /i/; a few end with /a/ (mostly words for relatives and divine names) and /e/ (a few suffix derivations, possibly the same as /i/-stems). As well, in texts from Nuzi , stems of /u/ (or /o/?) are found, mainly on non-Hurrian names and
5478-790: The recognition of the word "king". Hurrian language Hurrian is closely related to Urartian , the language of the ancient kingdom of Urartu . Together they constitute the Hurro-Urartian language family . The external connections of the Hurro-Urartian languages are disputed. There exist various proposals for a genetic relationship to other language families (e.g. the Northeast Caucasian languages , Indo-European languages , or Kartvelian languages which are spoken in Georgia ). It has also been speculated that it
5561-449: The relative position of the stylus to the tablet, the writer could use a single tool to make a variety of impressions. For numbers, a round-tipped stylus was initially used, until the wedge-tipped stylus was generalized. The direction of writing was from top-to-bottom and right-to-left. Cuneiform clay tablets could be fired in kilns to bake them hard, and so provide a permanent record, or they could be left moist and recycled if permanence
5644-471: The same case is used for the subject of an intransitive verb as for the object of a transitive one; this case is called the absolutive . For the subject of a transitive verb, however, the ergative case is used. Hurrian has two numbers, singular and plural. The following table outlines the case endings (the terms used for some of the more obscure cases vary between different authors). In certain phonological environments, these endings can vary. The f of
5727-415: The syllable [ɡu] had fourteen different symbols. The inventory of signs was expanded by the combination of existing signs into compound signs. They could either derive their meaning from a combination of the meanings of both original signs (e.g. 𒅗 ka 'mouth' and 𒀀 a 'water' were combined to form the sign for 𒅘 nag̃ 'drink', formally KA×A; cf. Chinese compound ideographs ), or one sign could suggest
5810-476: The third century AD. The complexity of cuneiforms prompted the development of a number of simplified versions of the script. Old Persian cuneiform was developed with an independent and unrelated set of simple cuneiform characters, by Darius the Great in the 5th century BC. Most scholars consider this writing system to be an independent invention because it has no obvious connections with other writing systems at
5893-432: The time, such as Elamite , Akkadian, Hurrian , and Hittite cuneiforms. It formed a semi-alphabetic syllabary, using far fewer wedge strokes than Assyrian used, together with a handful of logograms for frequently occurring words like "god" ( 𐏎 ), "king" ( 𐏋 ) or "country" ( 𐏌 ). This almost purely alphabetical form of the cuneiform script (36 phonetic characters and 8 logograms), was specially designed and used by
5976-669: The token shapes were the original basis for some of the Sumerian pictographs. Mesopotamia's "proto-literate" period spans roughly the 35th to 32nd centuries BC. The first unequivocal written documents start with the Uruk IV period, from circa 3,300 BC, followed by tablets found in Uruk III, Jemdet Nasr , Early Dynastic I Ur and Susa (in Proto-Elamite ) dating to the period until circa 2,900 BC. Originally, pictographs were either drawn on clay tablets in vertical columns with
6059-547: The two languages are related, their writing systems seem to have been developed separately. For Hurrian, there were even different systems in different polities (in Mitanni , in Mari , in the Hittite Empire). The Hurrian orthographies were generally characterised by more extensive use of syllabograms and more limited use of logograms than Akkadian. Urartian, in comparison, retained a more significant role for logograms. In
6142-448: The use of agents and subordinates to manage affairs. In essence, the Murašû Archive was the business repository of the Murašû firm - a business house dealing mainly with the management of agriculture . The Murašû firm would lease land and water from its owners, farm the land to produce crops, pay rents and taxes to the owners, and even sublet the leased lands to tenants, who would work the land with livestock, seeds, and equipment provided by
6225-565: The word more precisely, two phonetic complements were added – Ú (𒌑) for the syllable [u] in front of the symbol and GA (𒂵) for the syllable [ga] behind. Finally, the symbol for 'bird', MUŠEN (𒄷) was added to ensure proper interpretation. As a result, the whole word could be spelt 𒌑𒉀𒂵𒄷, i.e. Ú.NAGA.GA (among the many variant spellings that the word could have). For unknown reasons, cuneiform pictographs, until then written vertically, were rotated 90° counterclockwise, in effect putting them on their side. This change first occurred slightly before
6308-561: Was adapted to writing Hittite, a layer of Akkadian logographic spellings, also known as Akkadograms, was added to the script, in addition to the Sumerian logograms, or Sumerograms, which were already inherent in the Akkadian writing system and which Hittite also kept. Thus the pronunciations of many Hittite words which were conventionally written by logograms are now unknown. The Hurrian language (attested 2300–1000 BC) and Urartian language (attested 9th–6th century BC) were also written in adapted versions of Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform. Although
6391-406: Was further developed and modified in the writing of the Akkadian language to express its sounds. Often, words that had a similar meaning but very different sounds were written with the same symbol. For instance the Sumerian words 'tooth' [zu], 'mouth' [ka] and 'voice' [gu] were all written with the original pictogram for mouth (𒅗). Words that sounded alike would have different signs; for instance,
6474-452: Was in use for more than three millennia, through several stages of development, from the 31st century BC down to the second century AD. The latest firmly dateable tablet, from Uruk, dates to 79/80 AD. Ultimately, it was completely replaced by alphabetic writing , in the general sense, in the course of the Roman era , and there are no cuneiform systems in current use. It had to be deciphered as
6557-483: Was invented, during the Neolithic , when clay tokens were used to record specific amounts of livestock or commodities. In recent years a contrarian view has arisen on the tokens being the precursor of writing. These tokens were initially impressed on the surface of round clay envelopes ( clay bullae ) and then stored in them. The tokens were then progressively replaced by flat tablets, on which signs were recorded with
6640-451: Was not needed. Most surviving cuneiform tablets were of the latter kind, accidentally preserved when fires destroyed the tablets' storage place and effectively baked them, unintentionally ensuring their longevity. The script was widely used on commemorative stelae and carved reliefs to record the achievements of the ruler in whose honor the monument had been erected. The spoken language included many homophones and near-homophones, and in
6723-459: Was recognized as early as 1890 by Sayce (ZA 5, 1890, 260–274) and Jensen (ZA 6, 1891, 34–72). After the fall of the Akkadian Empire , Hurrians began to settle in northern Syria , and by 1725 BC they constituted a sizable portion of the population of Yamhad . The presence of a large Hurrian population brought Hurrian culture and religion to Aleppo , as evidenced by the existence of certain religious festivals that bear Hurrian names. Of Nergal
6806-406: Was retained, but was now pronounced immerum , rather than the Sumerian udu . Such retained individual signs or, sometimes, entire sign combinations with logographic value are known as Sumerograms , a type of heterogram . The East Semitic languages employed equivalents for many signs that were distorted or abbreviated to represent new values because the syllabic nature of the script as refined by
6889-506: Was triggered by texts discovered in Boğazköy in the 1910s and Ugarit in the 1930s. Speiser (1941) published the first comprehensive grammar of Hurrian. Since the 1980s, the Nuzi corpus from the archive of Silwa-tessup has been edited by G. Wilhelm. Since the late 1980s, significant progress was made due to the discovery of a Hurrian-Hittite bilingual, edited by E. Neu ( StBoT 32). The Hurrian of
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