hurro-urartian languages

The Hurro-Urartian languages are an extinct language family of the Ancient Near East, which comprises only two languages, Hurrian and Urartian (Asia Minor and the Caucasus). Little is known about these agglutinative languages, but they definitely do not belong to the Semitic or Indo-European language families. Some scholars see affinities between Hurro-Urartian and the Northeast Caucasian languages, and thus place them together in the Alarodian family. I. M. Diakonoff and Sergei Starostin relate them to the North Caucasian language family. Hurrian was the language of the Hurrians (occasionally called "Hurrites"), a people who entered northern Mesopotamia around 2300 BC, whose apogee was the kingdom of Mitanni (1450–1270 BC). The language was probably extinct by 1000 BC. Urartian was the language of Urartu, an ancient kingdom located around Lake Van (presently in Turkey) which were there between 1200 BC or earlier and 580 BC. The region was later populated by the Armenians, who speak an Indo European language. It is likely that some words of non-Indo-European origin in the Hittite and Armenian languages may be of Hurro-Urartian derivation.

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