A Town and Its People
Never a major urban center, Nuzi was a provincial agricultural town in the small Hurrian kingdom of Arrapha, whose capital is today buried under the Iraqi city of Kirkuk. Arrapha was situated along the southeastern edge of the area under Mittanian domination. Babylonia lay to the south. To the west was Assyria, whose revolt against the Hurrian kingdom of Mittani probably led to Nuzi's destruction in the 14th century (Stratum II of the site), and ultimately contributed to Mittani's collapse.
At the center of Nuzi was a palace, a finely appointed building from which
the mayor oversaw the town's administration. Next to the palace was a temple
with two sanctuaries. The northwestern sanctuary seems to have been dedicated
to Ishtar-Shawushka, goddess of war and sex. The other sanctuary may have
belonged to Teshup, chief god of the Hurrian pantheon. Numerous private
houses clustered around the palace and temple. The houses of some of the
town's wealthiest citizens were located about 330 yards (300 meters) north
of the main settlement. The topographical map to the right shows the palace/temple
area, located on the highest part of the tell. Nearly 5000 tablets were
found in the excavations at Nuzi, mostly business and legal documents, and
they were located in both the palace as well as in private residences. |
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Many of the homes and the palace at Nuzi were quite spacious and luxurious, and were probably multi-storied. Among the rooms discovered in the palace was a toilet (Room L25). The floor of the room and the bases of the walls were built of baked bricks to minimize water damage and mud. Underground plumbing constructed from ceramic pipe segments like this one led from the bathrooms and toilets of many Nuzi houses to the streets. The sewers that ran under the streets did not extend beyond the edge of the settlement; they simply emptied onto the sides of the mound. |
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 The
Hurrian language does not belong to either the Semitic or Indo-European
language families. It is probably related to the modern languages of the
northeast Caucasus region. Only a few documents written in Hurrian are known;
the majority were written in Babylonian, the lingua francaof the
day. Many of the inhabitants of Nuzi probably spoke both Hurrian and a Hurrian-influenced
dialect of Babylonian. The scribes at Nuzi were trained to write in Babylonian,
but their Hurrian background shows in how they composed their texts. Among
the texts from Nuzi are documents relating to the trial of the mayor, accused
of "improper behavior;" fictive "adoption papers" so
that land could be sold by one family to another; the lawsuit of a slave
woman named Kisaya, trying to convince the courts that she was really not
a slave, but a free woman, able to marry the man of her own choice; and
a few rare documents from the king of Arrapha, in which Nuzi was located,
referring to civil matters of the town. |
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These stone ducks are weights. Weights at Nuzi were based on the Babylonian
system of shekels, minas, and talents. A mina weighed about a pound. 60
shekels equaled a mina, and 60 minas a talent. The weights were often marked
with notches to be easily identified. The right duck, with 2 notches on
the neck, weighed 20 minas. The left one was originally 10 minas but was
broken, so it was re-marked with its new 7 mina weight, indicted by 7 notches
on its back, and it continued to be used. |