The Mitanni kingdom began, as Mirko Novák claims, a little after 1600 BC, during the Old Babylonian period, at least two generations before the sack of Babylon by the Hittites which Novák considers to have been in 1522 BC (J.

The Mitanni kingdom was known to its neighbors by various names. Egyptians referred to it as Maryannu, Nahrin and Mitanni, it was Hurri to the Hittites, and Hanigalbat or Hani-Rabbat

No native sources for the history of Mitanni have been found so far. The account is mainly based on Assyrian, Hittite, and

Within a few centuries of the fall of Washukanni to Assyria, Mitanni became fully Assyrianized and linguistically Aramaized, and use of the Hurrian language began to be discouraged throughout the Neo-Assyrian Empire. However,

The Mitanni controlled trade routes down the Khabur to Mari and up the Euphrates from there to Carchemish. For a time they also controlled the

The ethnicity of the people of Mitanni is difficult to ascertain. A treatise on the training of chariot horses by Kikkuli, a Mitanni writer, contains a number of Indo-Aryan glosses. Kammenhuber [de] suggested that this vocabulary was derived from the still

Some theonyms, proper names and other terminology of the Mitanni exhibit close similarities to Indo-Aryan, suggesting that an Indo-Aryan