Turukkaeans
The Turukkaeans were a Bronze and Iron Age people that lived at Zagros Mountains. Their endonym has sometimes been reconstructed as Turuk.
History
[edit]Middle Bronze
[edit]Turukkum was regarded by the Kingdom of Upper Mesopotamia as a constant threat, during the reign of Amorite Shamshi-Adad I (1813-1782 BCE) and his son and successor Ishme-Dagan (1781-1750 BCE). The Turukkaeans were allied to the Land of Ahazum, and they gathered at the town of Ikkallum to face the army of Ishme-Dagan, as Shamshi-Adad wrote in a letter to his other son Yasmah-Adad. Ishme-Dagan destroyed the army reporting "Not one man escaped".[1] Turukkum seems to have been made up of a collection of kingdoms with mixed populations, possibly mostly Hurrian but also heavily Semitic.[2]
The Turukkaeans were reported to have sacked the city of Mardaman, apparently under Hurrian rule, around the year 1769/68 BCE.[3] Babylon's defeat of Turukku was celebrated in the 37th year of Hammurabi's reign (c. 1773 BCE).
A significant early reference to them is an inscription by the Babylonian king Hammurabi, (r. circa 1792 – c. 1752 BCE) that mentions a kingdom named Tukriš (UET I l. 46, iii–iv, 1–4), alongside Gutium, Subartu and another name that is usually reconstructed as Elam. Other texts from the same period refer to the kingdom as Tukru.
Iron Age
[edit]By the early part of the 1st millennium BCE, names such as Turukkum, Turukku and ti-ru-ki-i are being used for the same region. In a broader sense, names such as Turukkaean been used in a generic sense to mean "mountain people" or "highlanders".
Tukru or Turukkum was said to have spanned the north-east edge of Mesopotamia and an adjoining part of the Zagros Mountains. In particular, they were associated with the Lake Urmia basin and the valleys of the north-east Zagros. They were therefore located north of ancient Lullubi, and at least one Neo-Assyrian (9th to 7th centuries BCE) text refers to the whole area and its peoples as "Lullubi-Turukki" (VAT 8006).
Hurrians
[edit]In terms of cultural and linguistic characteristics, little is known about the Tukri. They are described by their contemporaries as a semi-nomadic, mountain tribe, who wore animal skins. Some scholars believe they may have been Hurrian-speaking or subject to a Hurrian elite.[4] According to Horst Klengel, "The Turukka people evidently belonged to those late-gentile groups in which the primitive social conditions had already decayed and tribal leaders exercised a permanent function due to close contact, partly established through economic pressure, with the state-organized population practicing rain-fed agriculture in the Rania Plain and the Zagros foothills."[5]
The Turukkeans were closely associated with the Lullubi,[citation needed] and attacked the Hurrian city Madraman.[3]
See also
[edit]Footnotes
[edit]- ^ Sasson, Jack M., "Warfare", From the Mari Archives: An Anthology of Old Babylonian Letters, University Park, USA: Penn State University Press, pp. 181-214, 2015
- ^ Bryce, Trevor (2009). "Turukkum". The Routledge Handbook of The Peoples and Places of Ancient Western Asia. Routledge. p. 721.
- ^ a b Pfälzner, Peter (2018). "Keilschrifttafeln von Bassetki lüften Geheimnis um Königsstadt Mardaman". uni-tuebingen.de. University of Tubingen.
- ^ Læssøe, Jørgen (2014-10-24). People of Ancient Assyria: Their Inscriptions and Correspondence. Routledge. ISBN 9781317602613.
- ^ Eidem & Læssøe 2001, p. 25.
Bibliography
[edit]- German Archaeological Institute. Department of Tehran Archaeological releases from Iran, Volume 19, Dietrich Reimer, 1986 (in German)
- Wayne Horowitz, Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography. Winona Lake; Eisenbrauns, 1998.
- Jesper Eidem, Jørgen Læssøe, The Shemshara archives, Volume 23. Copenhagen, Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, 2001. ISBN 8778762456
- Jörgen Laessøe, The Shemshāra Tablets. Copenhagen, 1959.
- Jörgen Laessøe, "The Quest for the Country of *Utûm", Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1968, vol. 88 , no. 1, pp. 120–122.
- Eidem, Jesper; Læssøe, Jørgen, eds. (2001). The Shemshara Archives: The letters. Vol. 1. Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab.
- Victor Harold Matthews, Pastoral nomadism in the Mari Kingdom (ca. 1830-1760 B.C.). American Schools of Oriental Research, 1978. ISBN 0897571037
- Peter Pfälzner, Keilschrifttafeln von Bassetki lüften Geheimnis um Königsstadt Mardaman (webpage; German language), University of Tubingen, 2018.
- Daniel T. Potts, Nomadism in Iran: From Antiquity to the Modern Era. Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2014.
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