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.

The Turukkaeans were a Bronze and Iron Age people of Zagros Mountains. Their endonym has sometimes been reconstructed as Tukri.

History

Middle Bronze

Turukkum was regarded by the Old Assyrian Empire as a constant threat, during the reign of 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. Turukkum seems to have been made up of a collection of kingdoms with mixed populations, possibly mostly Hurrian but also heavily Semitic.

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

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.

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

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. 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."

The Turukkeans were closely associated with the Lullubi, and attacked the Hurrian city of Mardaman.

See also

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

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.
• 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.