Page 183 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

did not even speak an Indo-European language, and were in no

way related to the battle-ax people; they had merely been picked
up on the way.
They were probably related to each other, though this is not
certain. The Hurrians spoke a language o£ which we possess a

number of documents, clay tablets in cuneiform script, but it is
only possible to say that they spoke neither Indo-European nor
Semitic nor Sumerian, and that they belonged apparently to a
grouP of peoples which had inhabited the mountains of eastern

Turkey before the coming of Indo-European and Semitic speak­
ers, a group which is normally termed “Asian” merely for con­
venience. The Kassites may have spoken a language akin to
Elamite, but only a few words of it are known.

But in both cases they were led, at the time of their invasion
of the Amorite area, by an aristocracy which spoke an Indo-
European language. This aristocracy comprised the ruling princes
and chieftains, and in addition a warrior elite with a name whose
significance is still in dispute but which, it seems, can best

be translated as “knights,” with its connotation both of minor
aristocracy and of horse users. This Indo-European-speaking
aristocracy was undoubtedly descended from bodies of battle-ax

people who with their horses and chariots had penetrated south­
ward and fought their way to leadership of the “Asian” tribes
of the hills. But purity of language cannot be taken as signify­
ing purity of race. The small body of Norman soldiery which

conquered England from the Saxons spoke Norman French, and
for over a third of a millennium thereafter Norman French
was, in England, the language of an aristocracy which regarded
itself as the descendants of the knights who followed Duke

William to England. And yet we know that within the first
generation there were many Normans, even within the royal
family, who contracted marriages with daughters of the dispos­
sessed Saxons, and that before a hundred years had passed

there was more Saxon than Norman blood in the Norman aris­
tocracy. Similarly we can be sure that the “Indo-European aris­
tocracy of the Kassites and the Hurrians, for all that they retained
their language, was by now more Kassite and Hurrian than

“Indo-European.”