Replies

[snip] With the discovery of the Tell el-Amarna archives in Egypt it was found that one of the letters of the archives was written, apart from the introduction, in an unknown tongue. This letter, written by Tushratta, king of Mitanni, dealt in its six hundred lines with some matters interpreted with the help of other letters, and the language was deciphered. At first it was called Mitannian, but later changed to Subarean.

Then in the state archives of Boghazkeui in eastern Anatolia letters were found in a similar tongue, and its name was given as Khri. The people who spoke this language were called Khr. Scholars read the word differently Khar and Khur but finally they decided on Khur as the acceptable name, and accordingly the people are called Hurrians or Hurrites...

With every new discovery it became increasingly obvious that the Hurrians exercised great influence on the civilization of the Near East. It was even stated that with the arrival of the Hurrians in this part of the world a new era in civilization had dawned. In a sense they became the leading power, and "the story of their enormous expanse, from Armenia down to southern Palestine, and from the shores of the Mediterranean up to the borders of Persia, constitutes one of the most amazing chapters in the ancient history of the Near East."

The language of this people has been studied by linguists in an endeavor to unriddle it, but the historians know nothing of their history. "Hurrian" seemed therefore to be a tongue without a people. Those who spoke it were not Semitic, but neither were they Indo-Iranian.

Then the writings in alphabetic Khar of Ras Shamra came to light Translations from other languages into Khar proved that at least a part of the population used Khar as their daily speech. Who, then, were these Khar that impressed their name on Syria, their tongue on Asia Minor and on Mitanni, occupied a fortress in Palestine, were everywhere and nowhere in particular, were neither Semitic nor Indo-Iranian?

It became apparent not only that Khar was expressible in writing, but that the scribes who wrote in Khar were versed in a number of other languages as well, and wore themselves out in lexicographic study ("several rooms" in the library of Nikmed "contained only dic- tionaries and lexicons"). Consequently the idea that the Khar were cave dwellers or troglodytes (the biblical Horites) appears wholly untenable.

Most probably the Hurrian people is but a creation of modern linguists. If we bring the scene five to six hundred years closer to our time we begin to wonder whether the Khar of the inscriptions are not the Carians often mentioned in classic literature. In Egyptian the Mediterranean Sea was called the Sea of Khar(u). Was it the sea of troglodytes or the sea of the Carians? [/snip]

[Immanuel Velikovsky, "Ages in Chaos", pp 198-199]