Place · Bronze Age kingdom · Syria
Mitanni
A Hurrian-speaking kingdom in northern Syria and Upper Mesopotamia in the second millennium BCE whose ruling and military vocabulary was Indo-Aryan. The treaty between Šuppiluliuma and Šattiwaza, about 1380 BCE, swears by Mi-it-ra, Uru-wa-na, In-da-ra and the Na-ša-at-ti-ya — Mitra, Varuṇa, Indra and the Nāsatyas, in that order and in a recognisable grouping. Kikkuli's horse-training manual uses Indo-Aryan numerals for the number of laps, aika, tera, panza, satta, na, and the chariot nobility were the maryannu, from Sanskrit marya.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered — The kingdom and shared Indo-Iranian vocabulary are documented; this does not establish an Indian population or migration route.
- Location
- 36.800, 40.000
Worth knowing
Kikkuli's text is a practical manual — how many laps to run a chariot horse over how many days — and it counts them in something very close to Sanskrit, which is the most mundane surviving use of Indo-Aryan anywhere outside India.
This is a fossil ruling-class and technical vocabulary embedded in a Hurrian state, not evidence of an Indian population in Syria, and it does not establish which direction anyone moved; it indicates a shared Indo-Iranian inheritance at a stage close to the Rigveda's.
Connections (2)
- Canonised by textTell el-Amarna
The Indo-Aryan names of the Mitanni ruling house are known chiefly from the Amarna letters, where Tushratta writes to Amenhotep III about a marriage alliance. A separate Hittite treaty from Boghazkoy swears by Mitra, Varuna, Indra and the Nasatyas, and a Hittite horse-training manual uses Indo-Aryan numerals. The Rigvedic pantheon appears in Anatolian state archives.
- AnalogueThe Avesta
Two pieces of evidence for the same thing from opposite directions. The Mitanni treaties of about 1380 BCE, sworn in northern Syria, invoke Mi-it-ra, Uru-wa-na, In-da-ra and the Na-ša-at-ti-ya — Mitra, Varuṇa, Indra and the Nāsatyas — and Mitanni horse-training texts use Indo-Aryan numerals, in a state whose ordinary language was Hurrian and unrelated. The Avesta shows the Iranian branch of the same inheritance. One is a Near Eastern ruling stratum's fossil vocabulary; the other is a living scripture.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Mitanni” and “Indo-Aryan superstrate in Mitanni”. Annelies Kammenhuber, Die Arier im Vorderen Orient (1968); Manfred Mayrhofer on the Mitanni Indo-Aryan; text of the Šuppiluliuma–Šattiwaza treaty.
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