History of the Ancient Near East · Part 8 · The age of the great kings · B1–B2
Mitanni: Horses, Chariots and Gods from India
Part 8 of History of the Ancient Near East: in the 15th and 14th centuries BCE, a kingdom called Mitanni ruled northern Syria and Mesopotamia. Its people were Hurrians, but its kings had names and gods that come from India, and its horse trainers wrote the oldest training manual in the world. Instructions (walk the horses, do not gallop), time expressions (for three days, twice a day) and frequency adverbs, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Marcos, you love horses. Tonight, the people who were the greatest horse trainers of the ancient world.
Older. A kingdom called Mitanni, three hundred years before the Trojan War. Their kings prayed to gods whose names you could still hear today in India.
Northern Syria and Mesopotamia, about 1550–1260 BCE
Mitanni was a kingdom in northern Syria and northern Mesopotamia. Most of its people were Hurrians, who spoke a language unrelated to Semitic languages or to Indo-European ones. But its kings had names such as Tushratta and Shattiwaza, which come from an early form of Indo-Aryan, the family of the Sanskrit language of India.
Mitanni was a great power of its time, a rival of Egypt and then of the Hittites. Its army depended on light, fast chariots pulled by two horses, driven by a class of elite warriors called maryannu. Its kings wrote to the pharaohs as equals and sent them princesses as brides.
Its capital, Washukanni, has not yet been certainly identified; one site in north-eastern Syria is a strong candidate. In the 14th century BCE, Mitanni was defeated by the Hittites, and in the 13th it was swallowed by Assyria.
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