Urkesh: Abraham’s Ur of the Chaldees?
Germany to Build World’s First All-in-One Synagogue, Church and Mosque
A decade ago, the idea of building a unique religious structure that would combine prayer halls for the three main monotheistic religions was first proposed during archaeological excavations of a plot on the southern end of the Fischerinsel (Fisher Island) in the Mitte neighborhood of Berlin.
In 2012, an international architectural competition was held to plan the building, combining a synagogue, church and mosque. The Berlin architectural firm of Kuehn Malvezzi was selected.
The building, named the “House of One,” will not be large, only 670 square meters, and construction is scheduled to start in 2017. This will be the first structure of its kind combining separate prayer halls for the three religions.
War is fought not because of religion but because of shortsight profit, however, religion is one of the tools in the game – let’s hope this new structure will open upp for understanding and preace – in fact all the three monotheistic religions descends from Abraham, an Hurrian – Armenian patriarch living around 1500 BC.
Evidence is building that there might be a connection, or common origin between Judaism and the Hindu/Buddhist philosophies of India. There is evidence for a common origin for ideas present in both faiths from the homeland of both peoples in northern Iran and the Caucuses regions. This is the original home of the ancient Hurrians, who migrated from there to northern Mesopatamia in the 3rd millenium B.C.
Nuzi, an ancient city in Northeast Iraq at the present site of Yorghan Tepe, about 10 miles (16 km.) Southwest of Arrapha, modern Kirkuk, was a Hurrian administrative center not far from the Hurrian capital at Kirkuk in northern Iraq.
The Hurro-Urartian languages are an extinct language family of the Ancient Near East, comprising only two known languages: Hurrian and Urartian, both of which were spoken in the Taurus mountains area. The present day Armenians are an amalgam of both Hurrians and Urartians.
The Hurrians are equivalent to the Horites in the Old Testament, also called Hivites and Jebusites, a Canaanite tribe who built and inhabited Jerusalem prior to its conquest by King David.
Excavations at Nuzi has revealed more than 5,000 family and administrative archives spanning six generations, ca. 1450-1350 BC. They deal with the social, economic, religious and legal institutions of the Hurrians.
As with Mari, the Nuzi records demonstrate that the cultural practices recorded in the book of Genesis are authentic. The accounts are not fictional stories written at a much later time, as some critics claim, since the customs were unknown in later periods.
The Nuzi tablets have significant parallels with patriarchal customs. It may be that archaeology will never prove that Abraham really existed, but what we can prove is that his life and times, as reflected in the stories about him, fit perfectly within the early second millennium.
The Kura–Araxes culture, or the early trans-Caucasian culture, was a civilization that existed from 3400 BC until about 2000 BC. The earliest evidence for this culture is found on the Ararat plain.
The spread of pottery, along with archaeological evidence of invasions, suggests that the Kura-Araxes people may have spread outward from their original homes and, most certainly, had extensive trade contacts. Jaimoukha believes that its southern expanse is attributable primarily to Mitanni and the Hurrians.
The Mitanni kingdom was referred to as the Maryannu, Nahrin or Mitanni by the Egyptians, the Hurri by the Hittites, and the Hanigalbat by the Assyrians. The different names seem to have referred to the same kingdom and were used interchangeably, according to Michael C. Astour.
Hittite annals mention a people called Hurri (Ḫu-ur-ri), located in northeastern Syria. A Hittite fragment, probably from the time of Mursili I, mentions a “King of the Hurri”. The Assyro-Akkadian version of the text renders “Hurri” as Hanigalbat. Tushratta, who styles himself “king of Mitanni” in his Akkadian Amarna letters, refers to his kingdom as Hanigalbat.
The names of the Mitanni aristocracy frequently are of Indo-Aryan origin, but it is specifically their deities which show Indo-Aryan roots (Mitra, Varuna, Indra, Nasatya).
The common people’s language, the Hurrian language, is neither Indo-European nor Semitic. Hurrian is related to Urartian, the language of Urartu, both belonging to the Hurro-Urartian language family.
A Hurrian passage in the Amarna letters – usually composed in Akkadian, the lingua franca of the day – indicates that the royal family of Mitanni was by then speaking Hurrian as well.
Bearers of names in the Hurrian language are attested in wide areas of Syria and the northern Levant that are clearly outside the area of the political entity known to Assyria as Hanilgalbat. There is no indication that these persons owed allegiance to the political entity of Mitanni; although the German term Auslandshurriter (“Hurrian expatriates”) has been used by some authors.
In the 14th century BC numerous city-states in northern Syria and Canaan were ruled by persons with Hurrian and some Indo-Aryan names. If this can be taken to mean that the population of these states was Hurrian as well, then it is possible that these entities were a part of a larger polity with a shared Hurrian identity.
Maryannu is an ancient word for the caste of chariot-mounted hereditary warrior nobility which existed in many of the societies of the Middle East during the Bronze Age.
The term is attested in the Amarna letters written by Haapi. Robert Drews writes that the name ‘maryannu’ although plural takes the singular ‘marya’, which in Sanskrit means young warrior, and attaches a Hurrian suffix.
He suggests that at the beginning of the Late Bronze Age most would have spoken either Hurrian or Aryan but by the end of the 14th century most of the Levant maryannu had Semitic names.
Egyptian sources call Mitanni “nhrn”, which is usually pronounced as Naharin/Naharina from the Assyro-Akkadian word for “river”, cf. Aram-Naharaim.
Aram-Naharaim is a region that is mentioned five times in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. It is commonly identified with Nahrima mentioned in three tablets of the Amarna correspondence as a geographical description of the kingdom of Mitanni.
In Genesis, it is used somewhat interchangeably with the names Paddan Aram and Haran to denote the place where Abraham stayed briefly with his father Terah’s family after leaving Ur of the Chaldees, while en route to Canaan (Gen. 11:31), and the place to which later patriarchs obtained wives, rather than marry daughters of Canaan.
Scholars such as Carl Ferdinand Friedrich Lehmann-Haupt (1910) believed that the people of Urartu called themselves Khaldini after the god Ḫaldi, also known as Khaldi or Hayk, also known as Haik Nahapet (Hayk the Tribal Chief), the legendary patriarch and founder of the Armenian nation.
Paddan Aram refers to the part of Aram-Naharaim along the upper Euphrates, while Haran is mainly identified with the ancient Assyrian city of Harran on the Balikh River. According to one rabbinical Jewish tradition, the birthplace of Abraham (Ur) was also situated in Aram-Naharaim.
One translation of the name “Aram-Naharaim” is “Aram of Two Rivers”. The actual rivers referred to are not explicitly named in the Bible, although it is generally agreed that the first was the Upper Euphrates (called N-h-r-n by the Egyptians).
The name Nahrima in the Amarna letters denoted the region of the Upper Euphrates and its tributaries — the Balikh and the Khabur Rivers. Both Josephus and the Septuagint translate the name as Mesopotamia. Ancient writers later used the name “Mesopotamia” for all of the land between the Tigris and Euphrates.
However the usage of the Hebrew name “Aram-Naharaim” does not match this later usage of “Mesopotamia”, the Hebrew term referring to a northern region within Mesopotamia.
Mesopotamia is used throughout the Greek Septuagint (ca. 250 BC) to translate the Hebrew equivalent Naharaim. It was used to designate the land east of the Euphrates in north Syria.
Syria is known as Ḫrw (Ḫuru, referring to the Hurrian occupants prior to the Aramaean invasion) in the Amarna Period Egypt, and as Aram in Biblical Hebrew.
Nairi was the Assyrian name (KUR.KUR Na-i-ri, also Na-‘i-ru) for a Proto-Armenian (Hurrian-speaking) tribe in the Armenian Highlands, roughly corresponding to the modern Van and Hakkâri provinces of modern Turkey. Nairi was incorporated into Urartu during the 10th century BC.
Kura Araxes culture gave also rise to the later Khirbet Kerak-ware, or Beth Yerah, culture found in Syria and Canaan after the fall of the Akkadian Empire. They had trade/political relations with the First dynasty of Egypt, at approximately 3000 BCE.
“Khirbet Kerak ware” is a type of Early Bronze Age Syro-Palestinian pottery first discovered at this site. It is also found in other parts of the Levant (including Jericho, Beth Shan, Tell Judeideh, and Ugarit). Khirbet Kerak culture appears to have been a Levantine version of the Early Transcaucasian Culture.
Beth Yerah means “House of the Moon (god)”. Though it is not mentioned in the Hebrew Bible or other Bronze or Iron Age sources, the name may preserve, at least in part, the Canaanite toponym of Ablm-bt-Yrh, “the city/fort (qrt) of his-majesty Yarih”.
As Ablm (Heb. Abel), this location is mentioned in the 14th century BCE Epic of Aqht, and is thought to be a reference to the Early Bronze Age structure extant at Khirbet Kerak.
Jericho’s name in Hebrew, Yeriẖo, is generally thought to derive from the Canaanite word Reaẖ (“fragrant”), but other theories hold that it originates in the Canaanite word for “moon” (Yareaẖ) or the name of the lunar deity Yarikh for whom the city was an early centre of worship.
A decade ago, the idea of building a unique religious structure that would combine prayer halls for the three main monotheistic religions was first proposed during archaeological excavations of a plot on the southern end of the Fischerinsel (Fisher Island) in the Mitte neighborhood of Berlin.
In 2012, an international architectural competition was held to plan the building, combining a synagogue, church and mosque. The Berlin architectural firm of Kuehn Malvezzi was selected.
The building, named the “House of One,” will not be large, only 670 square meters, and construction is scheduled to start in 2017. This will be the first structure of its kind combining separate prayer halls for the three religions.
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