The Maryannu were a caste of chariot-mounted hereditary warrior nobility that existed in many of the societies of the Ancient Near East during the Bronze Age. Maryannu is a Hurrianized Indo-Aryan word, formed by adding Hurrian suffix -nni to Indo-Aryan root márya, meaning "(young) man"[1] or a "young warrior".[2] Philologist Martin West suggested that the name Meriones, a character in Homeric epic, is "identical" to maryannu.[3] Thus, Mērionēs would be the Homeric Greek version of the term, reflected in pre-Mycenaean poetic verse as Mārionās.[4]
The term is attested in the Amarna letters written by Haapi. Majority of the Maryannu had Semitic and Hurrian names.[5][6]
See also
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References
- ^ von Dassow, Eva, (2014). "Levantine Polities under Mittanian Hegemony". In: Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum, Nicole Brisch and Jesper Eidem (eds.). Constituent, Confederate, and Conquered Space: The Emergence of the Mittani State, p. 27
- ^ Drews, Robert (1994). The Coming of the Greeks: Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. 59. ISBN 978-0-691-02951-1. Retrieved 22 July 2019.
- ^ West, Martin L. (1997). The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth. Oxford: Clarendon Press. p. 612. ISBN 0-19-815042-3.
- ^ Teffeteller, Annette (2001). "Greek Athena and the Hittite Sungoddess of Arinna". In Susan Deacy; Alexandra Villing (eds.). Athena in the Classical World. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. p. 355. doi:10.1163/9789004497290_022.
- ^ Drews, p. 155
- ^ Watson, Janet; Khan, Geoffrey (2011). The Semitic Languages An International Handbook. De Gruyter. ISBN 9783110251586.
Further reading
- Abbas, Mohamed Raafat (2013). "The Maryannu in the Western Desert during the Ramesside Period". Abgadiyat. 8 (1): 128–133. doi:10.1163/22138609-90000015.
- Albright, W. F. (1930). "Mitannian maryannu, « chariot-warrior », and the Canaanite and Egyptian Equivalents". Archiv für Orientforschung. 6: 217–221. JSTOR 41661828.
- O'Callaghan, R. T. (1951). "New Light on the Maryannu as 'Chariot Warrior'". Jahrbuch für kleinasiatische Forschung. pp. 309–324. OCLC 55568033.
- REVIV, H. (1972). "Some Comments on the Maryannu". Israel Exploration Journal. 22 (4): 218–228. JSTOR 27925358.
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