THE ADAPTATION OF THE CUNEIFORM SCRIPT TO FOREIGN LANGUAGES

Wilfred H. van Soldt

The Case of Hurrian

Hurrians are attested in Mesopotamian sources since the reign of king Naram-Sin of Akkad, ca. 2200 bc (Wilhelm 1996: 175, Steinkeller 1998: 88f). This king conquered a number of places with Hurrian names, probably located in the Habur region in the northeast of modern Syria. Two hundred years earlier there are no Hurrian names to be found in the written sources and the population in the north seems to have been largely Semitic (ibid.). However, by 2200 bc Hurrians appear to have established themselves throughout northern Mesopotamia and their immigration must have started at least one generation earlier than the reign of Naram-Sin. In this early period, we already find a few Hurrian names of kings who ruled over city-states. King Atal-shen (ca. 2100) ruled over a small state in the Habur region that encompassed his capital Urkesh (modern Tell Mozan) and the city of Nawar/Nagar (modern Tell Brak; Salvini 1998: 106f). We know this from an inscription of his written in Akkadian (Wilhelm 1988). His successors, Tupkish and Tish-atal, probably only ruled over Urkesh; a large number of seal impressions of Tupkish and his consort were found in Tell Mozan (Buccellati & Kelly-Buccellati 1995–1996). King Tish-atal left us the first inscription in Hurrian (Wilhelm 1998). Attestations for the Hurrian population in northern Mesopotamia are scarce during the Old Babylonian period (2000–1600 bc),1 a period that saw a strong Amorite immigration from the west (Steinkeller 1998, 97f). They become more numerous during the time of the Mittani empire, which probably came into existence before the sixteenth century and which came to an end around 1340 (Wilhelm 1994, 1996: 179f). During this time Hurrian city-states were united under a dynasty whose members bore Indo-Arian names. The Mittani empire was one of the

1 For an overview of the available Hurrian sources, see Wegner (2000:16f). 118 wilfred h. van soldt prominent states during the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries bc and several letters of its last king Tušratta were found in the Egyptian capital Amarna (Akhet-Aten). The language used in these letters was Akkadian, which served as lingua franca in the ancient Near East. One letter, however, was written in Hurrian, the language of Mittani, and this text has become one of our most important sources for our knowledge of this language (Wegner 2000, 21, Wilhelm 1987, 1989: 32f). The scribes used a special orthography that seems to have been designed for writing the Hurrian language (see below). During the same period Hurrian influence in the Hittite empire (Anatolia) was strong, in particular in the religious cult. This may be so because of the close ties with the southern Anatolian state Kizzuwatna that was once part of Mittani, but which had been closely linked with the Hittite empire since king Tudḫaliya I at the end of the fifteenth century (Klengel 1999: 112f, Bryce 2005: 139). The influence is largely ascribed to the fact that Puduḫepa, one of the most influential Hittite queens, originated in this country. Many of the cultic texts from the Hittite capital Ḫattuša are written in Hurrian, but the orthography used to write the language was not really standardized. Only in a bilingual text in Hittite and Hurrian found in the 1980s is the orthography more or less the same as that of the Mittani letter of Tušratta (Neu 1988, 1996). The Mittani empire was conquered by the Hittite king Šuppiluliuma I around 1340, but the standard Mittani orthography was still in use until the beginning of the twelfth century, as is clear from texts written at both Karkamiš and Ugarit (van Soldt 1991: 364f). Hurrian was also written in another script, in the alphabetic cunei- form of Ugarit. Since the Mesopotamian cuneiform expressed the vowels but was less accurate with the consonants, and since Ugaritic cuneiform wrote no vowels but expressed the consonants quite clearly, words written in both scripts give us a better idea of their pronuncia- tion (for examples, see below).

The Use of the Mesopotamian Syllabary for the Hurrian Language

The Mesopotamian cuneiform script was probably developed for Sumerian. During the third millennium bc it was adapted for writing the Akkadian language. Since Sumerian and Akkadian have differ- ent phoneme inventories, it took considerable time before the script