--- In cybalist@..., "Glen Gordon" <glengordon01@...> wrote:
> > John:> >Tabira in Sumerian is acknowledged as coming from a
Hurrian> >substrate. It appears that Hurrian metalworkers were the
> >intermediary between PIE and Sumerian for a number of words (eg.
> >Sumerian gigir and PIE *kwelkos, for example).>
> What's the Hurrian version of the "wheel" word supposed to be?
Is /tabira/> attested in Hurrian?
Piotr inquired about my comments on Meluhhan in the context of
Miguel's observations re: Sumerian <tibira> or <tabira> (written LU2
URUDU-NAGAR, i.e. "[person]> copper.carpenter") means "metal worker,
coppersmith". My remarks were intended to highlight (1) that many
inscribed objects of ca. 3300 BCE found in settlements on Sindhu and
Sarasvati rivers relate to stone-/metal-workers;(2) that the Indo-
Aryan word for copper is: ta_m(b)ra; and (3) metal-caster is a
bharata which could be cognate with the bharata-s (a group of people)
mentioned in the R.gveda.
Re. Glen's query on Hurrian:
According to Gernot Wilhelm, the Hurrian version of tabira is:
tab-li 'copper founder'; tab-iri 'the one who has cast (copper)'.
Here is the reference.
We cannot say when Hurrians first arrived in this area. Linguistic
criteria, however, seem to indicate that the ancestors of the
historical Hurrians had already inhabited the mountainous regions of
eastern Anatolia for several centuries... The Sumerians probably
borrowed their word for 'coppersmith' (TABIRA, TIBIRA) from proto-
Hurrian [Hurrian tab-li 'copper founder'; tab-iri 'the one who has
cast (copper)'].
"...letters and documents of the Old Assyrian trading colonies of the
twentieth and nineteenth centuries... reveal that although
practically no Hurrians lived in Kanesh (modern Kultepe), the center
of trading activity, Hurrian names were common south of the Anti-
Taurus Mountains in this period. We do not know when Hurrians
migrated into the area between the Euphrates and the Mediterranean.
The Ebla tablets of the twenty-fourth and twenty-third centuries give
no indication of Hurrians in this region...
"The names of the kings of Mitanni are known to us only from the
early fifteenth century and later. Not one of these names is Hurrian.
Rather, they are all derived with more or less certain etymologies
from an archaic form of Indo-Aryan...... the language spoken in
Mitanni remained Hurrian...
"...At present the earliest known direct evidence for a Mitannian
ruler is the seal of a King Shuttarna, son of Kirta. Impressions of
his seal are found on two records from the second half of the
fifteenth century produced by a later king, namely, Saushtatar...
(Gernot Wilhelm, 1995, The Kingdom of Mitanni in Second-Millennium
Upper Mesopotamia, in:Jack M. Sasson (ed.) , Civilizations of the
Ancient Near East , Vol. II, pp. 1243-1254).