The Turukkaeans were a Bronze Age and Iron Age people of Zagros Mountains. Their endonym has sometimes been reconstructed as Tukri.
History
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 (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".
[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] Turukkum seems to have been made up of a collection of kingdoms with mixed populations, possibly predominately
Hurrian with notable
Semitic people presence.
The Turukkaeans were reported to have sacked the city of Mardaman, apparently under Hurrian rule, around the year 1769/68 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).
Hurrians and Turukkaeans
In terms of cultural and linguistic characteristics, little is known about the Turukkaeans. They are described by their contemporaries as a semi-
, mountain tribe, who wore animal skins. Some scholars believe they may have been
Hurrian-speaking or subject to a Hurrian elite.
According to , "
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 Madraman.
See also
Footnotes
Bibliography
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German Archaeological Institute. Department of Tehran Archaeological releases from Iran, Volume 19, Dietrich Reimer, 1986
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Wayne Horowitz, Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography. Winona Lake; Eisenbrauns, 1998.
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Jesper Eidem, Jørgen Læssøe, The Shemshara archives, Volume 23. Copenhagen, Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, 2001.
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Jörgen Laessøe, The Shemshāra Tablets. Copenhagen, 1959.
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Jörgen Laessøe, "The Quest for the Country of *Utûm", Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1968, vol. 88, no. 1, pp. 120–122.
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Victor Harold Matthews, Pastoral nomadism in the Mari Kingdom (ca. 1830-1760 B.C.). American Schools of Oriental Research, 1978.
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Peter Pfälzner, Keilschrifttafeln von Bassetki lüften Geheimnis um Königsstadt Mardaman (webpage; German language), University of Tubingen, 2018.
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Daniel T. Potts, Nomadism in Iran: From Antiquity to the Modern Era. Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2014.
