HURRIAN RELIGION. A Near Eastern phenomenon dating mainly from the second millennium BCE, the Hurrian religion is known more from contemporary and later Hittite documents than from native Hurrian sources. The Hurrians were an apparently Armenoid people who moved into northern Syria and northwestern Mesopotamia by at least 2300 BCE. The cities of Nuzi, in the eastern Tigris region, and Alalah, in northern Syria, were major centers of Hurrian culture by circa 1500 BCE. Wassukkanni was the capital of the reign.

The term Hurrian is an ethnic designation, and Subartu (roughly equivalent to the Hurrian Aranzah) is the Sumero-Akkadian name of the Hurrian-dominated area north and northeast of the Tigris. Mitanni was a Hurrian kingdom of the mid-second millennium in northern Syria and Iraq that had an Indo-Aryan aristocracy, and Urartu (whence Ararat) was a successor kingdom that flourished in southern Armenia circa 800 BCE. The Hurrian language, written...