Giorgio Buccellati 2013

“When were the Hurrians Hurrian? The persistence of ethnicity in Urkesh,”
in J. Aruz, S. Graff and Y. Rakic (eds.), Cultures in Contact, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, pp. 84-95.

The question about Hurrian ethnicity has been frequently discussed [see note at bottom of this abstract]: this paper moves further on this topic, asking precisely ‘when’ Hurrians were Hurrians, i.e. when the Hurrian ethnicity can be retraced for the first time; furthermore, the contribution describes the long-time spanning of the persistence of ethical features at Urkesh.

Ethnicity of Hurrians can be established (on the base of archaeological and textual elements from Urkesh), at least by the early third millennium BC; thus, within a semiotic system, the author describes what he defines as ‘Urkesh cluster’, involving some specific features (forming a peculiar pattern of evidence) hinting to the Hurrian ethnicity of Urkesh’s people: 1) the language (with the analysis of texts in Hurrian found at Tell Mozan and its reach onomastics, presenting clear Hurrian feature both in morphology and in lexis [see Texts]); 2) the religion, ‘shared intangible’ feature actualized by mythology [see e.g. Buccellati and Kelly-Buccellati 1997] and by physical structures related to specific rituals (such as the necromantic underground structure known as ābi or the monumental Temple Terrace [see e.g. Buccellati, F. 2010]); 3) the art, expressed e.g. by the two (copper alloy) lion-shaped statuettes of Tish-atal [Urkesh Website: r2] and by the numerous andirons [see Kelly-Buccellati 2004]; 4) the ‘shared icons’, i.e. the human and animal figurines (such as A15.226, ‘the Man with a Turban’) and the stone sculpture, represented by A9.149 [see the link, the third picture from top, shown just before the aforementioned A15.226, cf. also A9 items: A9.149], a stone head of a man; 5) the glyptics, showing peculiar characteristics in naturalism and expressionism.

In the conclusions, the author recalls the question posed at the beginning and answers this way: “The Urkesh cluster, as I have outlined it, is unique in its totality. A site like Tell Chuera in the third millennium B.C. has striking similarities to the Temple Terrace, but none of the other distinctive traits apply. […] The important aspect of a cluster that aims to establish ethnic identity is the distribution of the elements under discussion. What marks the Urkesh cluster as Hurrian, rather than just northern, is the bracketing of the traits I have analyzed into a semiotic complex, a bracketing that includes explicit factors, namely the linguistic evidence and the specificity of the religious traditions embodied in the ābi and in the Temple Terrace” (p. 94).

[As for the topic of ethnicity, see Buccellati, G. 1990, Buccellati, G. 1999, Buccellati, G. 2004, Buccellati, G. 2005, Buccellati, G. 2010, Buccellati and Kelly-Buccellati 1999, Buccellati and Kelly-Buccellati 2007, Buccellati and Kelly-Buccellati 2014 and Kelly-Buccellati 1996].