Turukkaeans

This article is about a people of ancient South West Asia. For an African ethnic group sometimes known as the Tukri, see Toucouleur people.

Turukkaeans

A map of Mesopotamia and south-western Iran during the 2nd Millennium BCE. The Tukri are generally believed to have been located immediately north of Lullubi (top centre of the map) during this period.
Regions with significant populations
South of Lake Urmia, Zagros Mountains
Languages
Hurrian
Related ethnic groups
Hurrians

The Turukkaeans were likely a Bronze and Iron Age tribe of Hurrians, who lived south of Lake Urmia in the northwestern Zagros Mountains. Their endonym has sometimes been reconstructed as Tukri.

History

Origins

The region of Turukkum, which was located south of Lake Urmia and in the valleys of the northwestern Zagros mountains, consisted of different kingdoms with a population that was predominantly Hurrian and significantly Semitic.^[1] The Turukkaeans are considered by most scholars today to have been a Hurrian^{[2][3][4][5][6][7][8]} and Hurrian-speaking^[9] tribe, often commanded by Hurrian military leaders.^[6]

Middle Bronze

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 I (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".^[10]

The Turukkaeans were reported to have sacked the city of Mardaman, apparently under Hurrian rule, around the year 1769/68 BCE.^[11] 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

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).

Culture

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.^[12] According to Horst Klengel [de], "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."^[13]

See also

• Gutian dynasty of Sumer
• Sumerian King List
• Gutian language

Footnotes

1. Bryce, Trevor (2009-09-10). The Routledge Handbook of the Peoples and Places of Ancient Western Asia: The Near East from the Early Bronze Age to the fall of the Persian Empire. Routledge. p. 721. ISBN 978-1-134-15908-6.
2. Lewy, Hildegard (1966). Assyria: 2,600-1816 B.C. Cambridge Univeristy Press. p. 23.
3. The Cambridge Ancient History: Volume 1. Cambridge University Press. 1970. p. 1055. ISBN 978-0-521-07791-0.
4. Cancik-Kirschbaum, Eva; Brisch, Nicole; Eidem, Jesper (2014-04-01). Constituent, Confederate, and Conquered Space: The Emergence of the Mittani State. Walter de Gruyter. p. 270. ISBN 978-3-11-026641-2.
5. Dalley, Stephanie (1984). Mari and Karana : two old Babylonian cities. Internet Archive. London ; New York : Longman. p. 151. ISBN 978-0-582-78363-8.
6. Læssøe, Jørgen (1963). People of ancient Assyria : their inscriptions and correspondence. Internet Archive. New York : Barnes & Noble. p. 94.
7. Chahin, M. (2001). The Kingdom of Armenia: A History. Psychology Press. p. 32. ISBN 978-0-7007-1452-0.
8. Masetti-Rouault, Maria Grazia; Calini, Ilaria; Hawley, Robert; d’Alfonso, Lorenzo (2024). Ancient Western Asia Beyond the Paradigm of Collapse and Regeneration (1200-900 BCE). NYU Press. p. 255. ISBN 978-1-4798-3462-4.
9. Radner, Karen; Moeller, Nadine; Potts, D. T. (2026-07-15). The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East: Volume II: From the End of the Third Millennium BC to the Fall of Babylon. Oxford University Press. p. 340. ISBN 978-0-19-068759-5.
10. 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
11. Pfälzner, Peter (2018). "Keilschrifttafeln von Bassetki lüften Geheimnis um Königsstadt Mardaman". uni-tuebingen.de. University of Tubingen.
12. Læssøe, Jørgen (2014-10-24). People of Ancient Assyria: Their Inscriptions and Correspondence. Routledge. ISBN 9781317602613.
13. Eidem & Læssøe 2001, p. 25.

Bibliography

• 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.