The July/August, 2008, issue of Archeology gave a lot of attention to Mesopotamia. The cover story, "Who Were the Hurrians," by Andrew Lawler extends their range from a tiny little area in northern Mesopotamia (according to Georges Roux, in Ancient Iraq (1992)) to something much larger. Hurrians were excellent individual fighters, but disorganized. Some Aryans split off from the main group and travelled west, joining the Hurrians and convinced them to accept the Aryans as a ruling class, and together they became the Mitanni.One of the first things they did was unify each independent city of axe-wielding warriors into a nation, with an organized army. The Aryans ruling the people were called the Maryannu. It was this army (under their first known king, Parattarna, and one or two subsequent kings who spred their empire south to Kadesh, west to Tarsus, and east to the Tigris River in the late 3rd millennium, with their capitol at Urkesh.

They were also thought to play only a small part in Mesopotamian politics, and only in the late 2nd millennium BC. Though they wrote in cuneiform, they were thought to have originated in the area of Armenia. It was thought that they had bigger, but unknown, effects on the Syrians to the north. Now you have to mentally erase all of these former opinions. With the excavation of Urkesh, we find that, as stated in the previous paragraph, they spred much further, and were there much earlier. The article reports on new evidence, which places the Hurrians in this area before the arrival of the Akkadians, in the 3rd millennium BC.

I've always thought of warriors who fought with axes as being very primitive; as though they could only speak with grunts (a personal bias based on the movies). It only shows how foolish that preconception is, when you realize that the oldest musical compositions in history came from these people, and that they were performed as far away as Ugarit.

At the head of their pantheon was Kumbari (god of the underworld) and his son, Teshub (the storm god), and there was a sun-god named Shamash. There was a stone-lined pit near the royal residence in the capitol of Urkesh. Since their main god was in the underworld, the archeologists there believe this pit was a way of interacting with him. They left offerings, kipsum, in there (animal figurines, silver rings, an obsidian blade, copper and bronze pins, and a jar with a figure of a nude woman running the full length of one side.) In much larger quantity, were the animal sacrifices. The majority of these were piglets, then puppies, then in much smaller quantities, sheep, goats and donkeys. If this pit was an earlier form of the Hittite api pits (Hittites copied religious things religiously from neighboring lands), evil demons could be 'sucked' into the 'underworld'. Among the Hittites, if somebody was murdered in their house, a priest might dig a pit (much smaller than the one in the discussion) in the floor, or just trace a circle representing it, in the floor. This is because it is assumed an evil spirit was involved, which needs to be sucked into the underworld. But the use of this pit for religious reasons is still controversial. The city's religious center, consisting of a temple over a walled acropolis, dates back at least to 2400 BC, but a third millennium terrace was was recently excavated, under which they found seals and pottery going back to the 4th millennium. Dates this early bring into question the idea that the Hurrians migrated down from the Caucasus Mtns., even though their language supports that idea.