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Hurrian

The Hurrians were a people of the Ancient Near East inhabiting what is now northern Syria and southeastern Turkey. They spoke an agglutinative language unrelated to neighboring Semitic or Indo-European languages but showing some affinity with other Subarean languages & Kiengi-Sumerian.

By about 2400 BC the Hurrians had expanded southward from the highlands of Anatolia. They infiltrated and occupied a broad arc of fertile farmland stretching from the Khabur River Valley to the foothills of the Zagros Mountains.

The Hurrians established themselves as rulers of small kingdoms in northern Mesopotamia and Syria. They have been identified at ancient Nuzi and Urkesh and other sites .....

Hurrian speakers formed the majority population of the kingdom of the Mitanni, though they appear to have been governed by a class of foreign nobility. Hittite exhibits many Hurrian loanwords, including most of the religious vocabulary. The 8th century kingdom of Urartu was also composed of Hurrian speakers, and the language is sometimes referred to as "Hurro-Urartean" (German: hurro-urartisch).

In the Bible they they were called Horites presumed to be a cave-dwelling people and their most famous ancestor is called Seir after whom a southern mountain land was named. They were invaded by the Edomites and subsequently disappeared. Besides Hittites, they also had close relations with the Hivites though neither of these languages show any affinity with the Hurrians whose language was anything but Canaanite.

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