Last week, we talked about the pre-Aryan civilisations and people of Iran. This week, we continue with a brief look at the Kassites, Hurrians, and the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex

Kassites

The origin of the Kassites is not known, but their material life suggests close connections to the civilisations of Hurrians and Hattis and even to the Luvian and other pre-Greek cultures of Anatolia and Minoans of Crete. The bronze work of the Kassites is very famous and is used to establish links between the Sumerians, Monoans, Etruscans, and Dravidian civilisation of the Indus Valley/ Mohenjodaro. Linguistic research relates the Kassite to the Indo-Iranians, but these are mainly extracted from the names of the deities, mentioned later in the Kassite history. As with the case of the Mitanni, these gods might belong to a ruling class that could have had Indo-Iranian roots, but in general, there is no strong evidence to suggest Indo-European roots of the Kassite. Other local inhabitants of Luristan and the rest of the southwest Iran, Lullubis and Gutians, do not show any Indo-Iranian characteristics either.

Kassites first entered written history in the Babylonian records when they attacked Babylon in a campaign from 2080-2043 BCE under the rule of their first king, Gandash. The Babylonian king, Shemshu-Ilune, the son of Hamurabi the great law-giver, defeated the unorganised Kassite tribes and drove them back to their mountain strongholds. Centuries later, in 1595 BCE, a united Kassite and Gutian force, under the command of Agum-Kak-Reme, attacked Babylon following the Hittite withdrawl, this time successfully, and ruled for about three hundred years, until 1180 BCE. The Kassite dominance of Babylon resulted in the introduction of horse to the Babylonian army, probably the result of earlier Kassite contacts with the Central Asian nomads.

The Kassites also extended their dominance to the Elamite kingdom of southwest Iran and put an end to the Old Elamite kingdom. They extended their lands to the borders of Egypt on one side, and as far north as the Urartu territory in Caucasus and Anatolia. Their last king, Anllil-nadin-akhe, was defeated by the Elamite king and was taken prisoner to Susa where he died in 1180, putting an end to the Kassite power in Mesopotamia. The remaining of the Kassite tribes, who had managed to keep their own identity, retreated back to the high mountains of Luristan, where they eventually became part of the strong kingdoms of Elam and eventually the Persian Empire.

Hurrians

To the north of the Kassites, there lived a group of people called Hurrians who were probably the native inhabitants of the southern Caucasus. They spoke a language unrelated to all other languages around them, and they seem to have spread quickly around the landscape in the second millennium BCE. Their area of influence stretched westwards to the Van Lake area and made them neighbours of the Hatti and later the Hittite Kingdom. Around the 1400 BCE, a group of Hurrian people formed a kingdom called the Mitanni in the areas of modern Kurdistan and eastern Turkey. The Mitannis adopted the Assyrian cuneiform and have thus left us with a few written documents of their civilisation. From these documents and also from an important inscription detailing a Mitanni peace treaty with the Hittites, we know that at least the ruling class of the Mitanni kingdom were from an Indo-European and specifically Indo-Aryan background. A manual for training of horses uses many Indo-European names for horse accessories, and in the aforementioned peace treaty, we have the name of many Indo-Aryan deities included in the pantheon of Mitanni gods. This has for long puzzled the historians, since the distance between the Mitanni and the rest of the Indo-Aryans who at the time lived in Central Asia and Afghanistan is great. Conventional scholarship suggests a migration of Indo-Iranians from the plains of Central Asia to northeastern Iran and then south to the Indus Valley. If this view is accepted, the existence of a semi-isolated Indo-Aryan ruling class in western Iran seems highly confusing. A possible suggested answer is the migration of a branch of Indo-Iranians from the northern plains of the Caspian Sea down the Caucasus and into western Iran. This and other suggestions seem to be kept at the level of theory in the absence of empirical evidence in their support.

Urartu, another Hurrian nation, also formed a civilisation of the Iranian plateau. Their kingdom was very successful in its relations with the dominant powers of the time, Assyrians and the Hittite. Urartu formed a trade confederation that benefited from the Assyrian and Hittite desire to access the tin and gold mines of Iranian mountains. With the wealth coming from their trade, the Urartu built lasting tributes to their civilisation whose remains still stand around north western Iran and eastern Anatolia. The later Armenian kingdoms claimed descent from the Urartans, and the name of the great mountain of Armenia, Mount Ararat, comes from the name of the Urartu people. This civilisation ceased to exist sometimes before the rise of the Median kingdom in the southern borders of their territory (ca. 650 BCE), but it left lasting influences, especially in architecture, on the kingdom of the Medes.

Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC)

Bactro-Margian Archaeological Complex is the name given to a an archaeological site in north-eastern Iran, between the modern cities of Mazar-e Sharif (ancient Balkh/Bactria) and Merv (Mergiana), hence the name. The site’s most well-known excavator is Victor Sarianidi who also holds the most controversial opinions about it as well.

BMAC includes a fortified settlement with a sizeable amount of artefact, including pottery and metal work. It is dated to around the early 2nd millennium BCE, and its most significant contribution to archaeology is to change the face of the Indo-Iranian archaeological argument forever. Sarianidi is the most prolific supporter of the theory that BMAC inhabitants included the ancestors of Iranian people. He has derived many conclusions from the BMAC discoveries and is of the belief that the material life of BMAC attest to a pre-Zoroastrian Iranian society, and that many aspects of later Zoroastrianism, including Soma/Haoma worship and ceremony are represented in this complex.

Others, in majority to Sarianidi, including C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, do not subscribe to Sarianidi’s interpretation of BMAC, mainly due to lack of convincing evidence suggesting any Iranian contact. It is a fact that despite the close proximity of supposed Iranians, the so-called people of Andronovo Culture, the Andronovo sites are very sparse near BMAC and we see almost no representation of Andronovo material culture in BMAC. J.P. Mallory also gives possibility to a passing of Iranians through BMAC in which part of the BMAC culture remained with the migrating nomads. It is now becoming more acceptable that BMAC existed independently of Iranian influence, and its similarities with Harappa might suggest its position as a trade outpost of Harappa in Central Asia. Whatever the truth, finding of answers to BMAC mysteries can certainly help clear out many questions to the origins of Indo-Iranians.

For Further Reading

Bryce, Trevor. The Kingdom of the Hittites. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1998

Mallory, J. K. “Archaeological models and Asian Indo-Europeans”, in Nicholas Sims-Williams ed. < Indo-Iranian Languages and Peoples, Oxford University Press, 2002

Cameron, George C. History of Early Iran, University of Chicago Press, 1976

Sulimirski, T. “The Scyths”, in Ilia Gershevitch ed. Cambridge History of Iran Cambridge University Press, 1985

Piotrovskii, B. B. The ancient civilization of Urartu Cowles Books Co., ?

Masson, V. M. & V. I. Sarianidi Central Asia: Turkmania Before The Acheamenids,Golborne, 1972

http://www.iranologie.com/history/history.html

http://www.dienekes.com/blog/archives/000374.html

http://www.crystalinks.com/kassites.html

http://campus.northpark.edu/history/WebChron/MiddleEast/Kassites.html

http://www.allaboutturkey.com/urartu.htm

http://www.angelfire.com/nt/Gilgamesh/hurrian.html