The Hurrians (Egyptian Khar, Greek Cari) were a people of the Ancient Near East. The Hurrian Kingdom in Mesopotamia was east of the Kingdom of their close relations the Mitanni which occupied land on both sides of the Euphrates River north of Carchemish now north-eastern Syria and southeastern Turkey.

The Hurrians established themselves as rulers of small kingdoms in northern Mesopotamia and Syria. They have been identified at ancient Nuzi and Urkesh and other sites .....

By about 2400 BC the Hurrians had expanded southward from the highlands of Anatolia. They infiltrated and occupied a broad arc of fertile farmland stretching from the Khabur River Valley to the foothills of the Zagros Mountains.

They spoke an agglutinative language unrelated to neighboring Semitic or Indo-European languages but, showing some affinity with other Subarean languages & Kiengi-Sumerian. It is supposed by Burney to have been the forerunner of Urartian of the 8th century kingdom of Urartu, and the language is sometimes referred to as "Hurro-Urartean" (German: hurro-urartisch). Tolstov identified them as the founders of Khwarezmia which he exlained as meaning Hurri-Land. Previously, Hurrian speakers formed the majority population of Subar-Tu and the kingdom of the Mitanni, though they appear to have been governed by a class of foreign nobility. Hittite exhibits many Hurrian loanwords, including most of the religious vocabulary.

However, all this is in contrast with Egyptian references to Khar which concern a southern region of Canaan. Despite the widespread sphere of Hurrian influence, this is just about the last place in the near-east one would expect to find an agglutinative language. Nevertheless this location and the similarity of the biblical term Hori to the Egyptian term Khar, formerly translated as Harri, has connected the Biblical Horites. Their most famous ancestor is called Seir but no geneology is given for him. While in history Hurrians had close relations with so-called Hittites, biblical Horites are closely associated, through Seir's son Zibeon, with the Hivites. It may be that rather than being a nation, the biblical term Hori may simply refer to a lifestyle common among Hivites which if a meaning is derived from their name makes them a "cave-dwelling" people -Troglodytes. They were infiltrated by the Edomites and subsequently assimilated.

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