Johannes Friedrich und die Anfänge der Hurritologie

Abstract The philological and linguistic research into the Hurrian language began in 1889 after the discovery of the Amarna tablets, among which was a very large tablet, the so-called “Mittani tablet,” a letter of almost 500 lines in the Hurrian language, sent by king Tušratta of Mittani to pharao Amenophis III. In a short time, the meaning of some nouns and verbs could be revealed with the help of letters from the same rulers written in Akkadian. This first phase of decoding the Hurrian language ended with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. The second phase began in 1932 with a publication by Ferdinand Bork and Johannes Friedrich’s new, collation-based transcription of the Mittani letter that appeared in the same year and, after heated arguments in which Bork represented baseless positions, ended in 1939 with the start of the Second World War.