Hurrian language in the context of "Pre-Indo-European languages"

Cuneiform is a logo-syllabic writing system that was used to write several languages of the ancient Near East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. Cuneiform scripts are marked by and named for the characteristic wedge-shaped impressions (Latin: cuneus) which form their signs. Cuneiform is the earliest known writing system and was originally developed to write the Sumerian language of southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq).

Over the course of its history, cuneiform was adapted to write a number of languages in addition to Sumerian. Akkadian texts are attested from the 24th century BC onward and make up the bulk of the cuneiform record. Akkadian cuneiform was itself adapted to write the Hittite language in the early 2nd millennium BC. The other languages with significant cuneiform corpora are Eblaite, Elamite, Hurrian, Luwian, and Urartian. The Old Persian and Ugaritic alphabets feature cuneiform-style signs; however, they are unrelated to the cuneiform logo-syllabary proper. The latest known cuneiform tablet, an astronomical almanac from Uruk, dates to AD 79/80.

The Hurrians (/ˈhʊəriənz/; Hurrian: 𒄷𒌨𒊑, romanized: Ḫu-ur-ri; also called Hari, Khurrites, Hourri, Churri, Hurri) were a people who inhabited the Ancient Near East during the Bronze Age. They spoke the Hurrian language, and lived throughout northern Syria, upper Mesopotamia and southeastern Anatolia.

The Hurrians were first documented in the city of Urkesh, where they built their first kingdom. The largest and most influential Hurrian kingdom was Mitanni. The population of the Hittite Empire in Anatolia included a large population of Hurrians, and there is significant Hurrian influence in Hittite mythology. By the Early Iron Age, the Hurrians had been assimilated with other peoples. The state of Urartu later covered some of the same area. A related people to the Hurrians are the Urarteans.

Mitanni or Mittani (c. 1550–1260 BC), earlier called Ḫabigalbat in old Babylonian texts, c. 1600 BC; Hanigalbat or Hani-Rabbat in Assyrian records, or Naharin in Egyptian texts, was a Hurrian-speaking state in northern Syria and southeast Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) with Indo-Aryan linguistic and political influences. Since no histories, royal annals or chronicles have yet been found in its excavated sites, knowledge about Mitanni is sparse compared to the other powers in the area, and dependent on what its neighbours commented in their texts.

The Hurrians were in the region as of the late 3rd millennium BC. A king of Urkesh with a Hurrian name, Tupkish, was found on a clay sealing dated c. 2300 BC at Tell Mozan. The first recorded inscription of their language was of Tish-atal (c. 21st century BC), king of Urkesh. Later on, Hurrians made up the main population of Mitanni, which was firstly known as Ḫabigalbat, at Babylonia, in two texts of the late Old Babylonian period, during the reign of Ammi-Saduqa, (c. 1638–1618 BC), in low middle chronology.

Akkadian (/əˈkeɪdiən/ ə-KAY-dee-ən; Akkadian: 𒀝𒅗𒁺𒌑(𒌝), romanized: Akkadû(m)) is an extinct East Semitic language that is attested in ancient Mesopotamia (Akkad, Assyria, Isin, Larsa, Babylonia) from the mid-third millennium BC until its gradual replacement in common use by Old Aramaic among Mesopotamians by the 8th century BC.

Akkadian, which is the earliest documented Semitic language, is named after the city of Akkad, a major centre of Mesopotamian civilization during the Akkadian Empire (c. 2334–2154 BC). It was written using the cuneiform script, originally used for Sumerian, but also used to write multiple languages in the region including Eblaite, Hurrian, Elamite, Old Persian and Hittite. The influence of Sumerian on Akkadian went beyond just the cuneiform script; owing to their close proximity, a lengthy span of contact and the prestige held by the former, Sumerian significantly influenced Akkadian phonology, vocabulary and syntax. This mutual influence of Akkadian and Sumerian has also led scholars to describe the languages as a sprachbund.

The Ugaritic alphabet is an abjad (consonantal alphabet) with syllabic elements written using the same tools as cuneiform (i.e. pressing a wedge-shaped stylus into a clay tablet), which emerged c. 1400 or 1300 BCE to write Ugaritic, an extinct Northwest Semitic language; it fell out of use amid the Late Bronze Age collapse c. 1190 BCE. It was discovered in Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra, Syria) in 1928. It has 30 letters. Other languages, particularly Hurrian, were occasionally written in the Ugaritic script in the area around Ugarit, but not elsewhere.

Clay tablets written in Ugaritic provide the earliest evidence of both the North Semitic and South Semitic orders of the alphabet, which gave rise to the alphabetic orders of the reduced Phoenician writing system and its descendants, including the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, Hebrew, Syriac, Greek and Latin, and of the Geʽez script, which was also influenced by the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing system, and adapted for Amharic. The Arabic and Ancient South Arabian scripts are the only other Semitic alphabets which have letters for all or almost all of the 29 commonly reconstructed Proto-Semitic consonant phonemes.