Mitanni

Mitanni, also called Hanigalbat (Hanigalbat, Khanigalbat) in Assyrian or Naharin in Egyptian texts, was a Hurrian-speaking state in northern Syria and Southeast Anatolia from c. 1500 to 1300 BCE. Mitanni came to be a regional power after the Hittite destruction of Amorite, Babylon and a series of ineffectual Assyrian kings created a power vacuum in Mesopotamia.

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · See also · External links

B

• There is not a single cultural element of Central Asian, Eastern European or Caucasian origin in the archaeological culture of the Mittanian area [….] But there is one element novel to Iraq in Mittanian culture and art, which is later on observed in Iranian culture until the Islamisation of Iran: the peacock...
  • Burchard Brentjes 1981, The Mittanians and the Peacock. Brentjes, Burchard, in "Ethnic Problem of the History of Central Asia in the Early Period", ed. M.S.Asimov, B.A.Litvinsky, L.I.Miroshnikov, D.S.Rayevsky, Nauka, Moscow, 1981. Quoted in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press.

M

• Our dating of the Indo-Aryan element in the Mitanni texts is based purely and simply on written documents offering datable contexts. While we cannot with certainty push these dates prior to the fifteenth century BC. It should not be forgotten that the Indic elements seem to be little more than the residue of a dead language in Hurrian, and that the symbiosis that produced the Mitanni may have taken place centuries earlier.
  • J.P. Mallory, quoted in TALAGERI, Shrikant G. 2001. Michael Witzel – An Examination of his Review of my Book.

S

• The Nuzi archives, from the Mitanni vassal state of Arraphe (Kirkuk), contain the only sources on Hurrian society in Mesopotamia. These texts, which date to the late fifteenth and fourteenth centuries BC, provide glimpses of peasants and craftsmen working for the king and paid in rations, and of rich individuals in possession of estates, the latter often acquired by fictive inheritance under the terms of adoption in return for a gift. In Nuzi, women held a special position and enjoyed extensive rights.
  • Sigfried J. de Laet (ed.), History of Humanity: From the Third Millennium to the Seventh Century BC (UNESCO Publishing, 1996), p. 483

• They were Indian heroes, who rode westward and with their precious weapon the war horse and their own ardent energy made themselves felt as a power far and wide in the aging Babylonian Empire.
  • Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West