Hurrians

The Hurrians were a people of the Ancient Near East inhabiting what is now northern Syria and southeastern Turkey. They spoke a language unrelated to neighboring Semitic or Indo-European languages.

Hurrian speakers formed the majority population of the kingdom of the Mitanni, though they appear to have been governed by a class of foreign nobility. Hittite exhibits many Hurrian loanwords, including most of the religious vocabulary. The 8th century kingdom of Urartu was also composed of Hurrian speakers, and the language is sometimes referred to as "Hurro-Urartean" (German: hurro-urartisch).