Indo-Aryan words in Hurrian

[Michael Witzel]

Many thanks, Bjarte, for drawing our attention to this.

>Hurrianized words of Indo-Aryan (?) origin found in cuneiform sources from
>mainly the fourteenth century BC.

Yes, (pre-)Old Indo-Aryan, not Indo-Iranian.

>It is curious that some of these words,
>for instance sattavartanna (or rather -vardanna), appear to contain Middle
>Indian assimilations. How can satta- instead of sapta- be explained?

This is an old canard, perpetuated by SS Misra (Aryan Problem 1992) and
Norman (1995, Erdosy's Indo_Aryan vol.)
As has been known for long, satta in satta-vartana 'seven turns' has been
influenced by Hurrite  'seven' (J. Friedrich 1940) and is not a reflex of
the much later MIA satta 'seven'; in the same vein, the words starting with
b- such as bi- did not receive their b- from a MIA pronunciation of vi,  as
Misra maintains, but are due to the fact that Mitanni does not allow
initial v- (Diakonoff 1971: 30, 45). In sum, the Mitanni IA words are not
Prakritic but (pre-)Rgvedic.

As you say:
>In Hurrian, the sequence -pt- was perfectly possible. Either, we must accept a
>Middle Indian dialect in the fourteenth century, or we must assume that
>these words passed into Hurrian indirectly, through another language.

or see above.

>In Klaus Klostermaier's article.....
>I fail to see how the presence of Hittites in Anatolia about 2000 BC and
>the presence of Kassites (a non-Indo-European people) in Mesopotamia about
>1600 BC can be relevant to an Aryan migration into India.

Only in so far as the Kassites had contacts with (pre)OIA as some loan
words  indicate (gods, horse color)

> As for the
>Mittani kings, they were obviously Hurrians, not Aryans, although some of
>them, after the Hurrian expansion (!), had throne names with an Aryan, or
>non-Hurrian, "ring". This does not necessarily mean that there were ever
>Indo-Aryans present in the Mittani empire.

Again, some CONTACT must have happened to account for the many male (!)
personal names, a few IA gods,  and many items relating to horses and horse
racing. Mayrhofer assumes contact a (few) hundred years  before c. 1380,
the date of the Mitanni-Hittite agreement

> No traces of Indo-Aryan words can be found among
>the Hurrians before the middle of the millennium. In Hurrian court poetry
>from the seventeenth century, no Aryan influence can be detected,

That is important information, and agrees with what Mayrhofer supposes.
However,

>which, I
>suppose, makes an Indo-Aryan "dynasty" unlikely.

I find more difficult to swallow. Whether a real IA dynasty existed or not,
we do not take royal names from horse trainers (or, today, from
computer-wallas: Bill I, king of X-sthan?)

> this has no relevance whatever to the
>question of an Aryan migration into India.

That, I find a moot question, still. ONE group of (pre-)OIA, probably on
the Eatern (Iranian) side of the Zagros range, had contact with the
Kassites and with the Mitannis before these moved into Mesopotamia.

For dating (esp. of the RV) it is important to note that some of the
Mitanni words have a pre-Rgvedic form, thus are pre-Old-Indo-Aryan.







========================================================
Michael Witzel
Department of Sanskrit & Indian Studies, Harvard University
2 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge MA 02138, USA

ph. 1- 617-496 2990 (also messages)
home page:  http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/mwpage.htm

Elect. Journ. of Vedic Studies:  http://www1.shore.net/~india/ejvs