Mitanni

"There is not a single cultural element of Central Asian, Eastern European or Caucasian origin in the archaeological culture of the Mittanian area [….] But there is one element novel to Iraq in Mittanian culture and art, which is later on observed in Iranian culture until the Islamisation of Iran: the peacock..."

"The numerals are distinctively Indic not Iranian; aika is identical with the Sanskrit eka while ' one ’ in Zend is aeva. So the s is preserved in Satta where it becomes h in Iranian (hapta) and the exact form is found, not indeed in Sanskrit, but in the Prakrits which were supposed to be post-Vedic. Even the personal names look Indic rather than Iranian."

"Our dating of the Indo-Aryan element in the Mitanni texts is based purely and simply on written documents offering datable contexts. While we cannot with certainty push these dates prior to the fifteenth century BC. It should not be forgotten that the Indic elements seem to be little more than the residue of a dead language in Hurrian, and that the symbiosis that produced the Mitanni may have taken place centuries earlier."

"The Nuzi archives, from the Mitanni vassal state of Arraphe (Kirkuk), contain the only sources on Hurrian society in Mesopotamia. These texts, which date to the late fifteenth and fourteenth centuries BC, provide glimpses of peasants and craftsmen working for the king and paid in rations, and of rich individuals in possession of estates, the latter often acquired by fictive inheritance under the terms of adoption in return for a gift. In Nuzi, women held a special position and enjoyed extensive rights."

"They were Indian heroes, who rode westward and with their precious weapon the war horse and their own ardent energy made themselves felt as a power far and wide in the aging Babylonian Empire."

"But in the selfsame valleys of the Indus we think we see at work that cleavage which parted cognate races from those returning southwards to their ancient home, and drove them westwards to the broad expanse of hither-Asia, where in course of time we find them as conquerors and founders of mighty dynasties, erecting ever more explicit monuments to History."