Studies in the Hurrian Language and Texts

• Applicants: Dr. Sebastian Fischer; Professorin Dr. Elisabeth Rieken; Professor Dr. Daniel Schwemer; Ilya Yakubovich, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Egyptology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies ; Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 551712978

Hurrian is a non-Indo-European language, mostly used in writing in the second millennium BCE and attested through cuneiform and Ugaritic alphabetic texts. Although Hurrians played an important role in the cultural contacts between Mesopotamia and Anatolia, the field of Hurrian Studies is much less rounded up than either Assyriology or Hittitology. In particular, there is no reference grammar of Hurrian, no up-to-date Hurrian dictionary, while the majority of Hurrian texts are published without translations. This state of affairs has less to do with the limitations of knowledge than with the lack of institutional support. To remedy the situation, a twelve-year project focusing on the key reference tools in the field of Hurrian studies is proposed by a team of cuneiform philologists. Dr. Sebastian Fischer, the only German researcher focusing in Hurrian within his generation, has teamed up with Dr. Ilya Yakubovich, a scholar of Ancient Anatolian languages with a comprehensive experience in creating reference tools for the related field of Luwian studies (eDiAna and Luwili projects). Prof. Elisabeth Rieken (Marburg) and Prof. Daniel Schwemer (Würzburg) both directed digital projects in the field of Hittitology (HFR and TLHdig). The short name of the project is Tive ('word' in Hurrian). The first phase of the Tive project has the compilation of the digital Hurrian corpus as ist goal. The raw data will be imported from the TLHdig project and annotated with the help of a new interface, which will represent a modification of the OXTED program, used for the input of data in the HFR project. The aim of the second phase of the Tive project is the development of a digital corpus-based Hurrian dictionary. It takes inspiration from the eDiAna project, which accomplished the parallel task for the Indo-European Anatolian languages. The third stage of the Tive project focuses in using the corpus and dictionary data for the philological edition of Hurrian texts. This task closely resembles ist counterpart accomplished for the Luwian cuneiform texts within the framework of the Luwili project. The final three years of the Tive project will be devoted to studying the cultural implications of the newly edited Hurrian texts. The outreach component of the same phase will consist in preparing a new introduction to the Hurrian language. In addition to ist research dimension, the proposed multi-year project is expected to create an environment for bringing up a new generation of Hurritologists, thus ensuring the survival and proliferation of the field of Hurrian studies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Italy, Spain
• Co-Investigators: Dr. Susanne Görke; Professor Dr. Gerfrid G. W. Müller; Professorin Dr. Doris Prechel; Privatdozent Dr. Christian Reul; Professor Dr. Thomas Richter
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Ignasi-Xavier Adiego Lajara; Professor Dr. Mauro Giorgieri