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Ronan James Head

Urartians borrowed Mesopotamian cuneiform script to record, in their own language, the annals of their rulers—as in this inscription from the museum in Van. The only known relative of the Urartian language is Hurrian, which was spoken by peoples who settled in northern Mesopotamia around the end of the fourth millennium B.C. In the mid-second millennium B.C., Hurrian peoples formed the powerful Mittani kingdom of northern Syria.