Comparative Notes on Hurro-Urartian, Northern Caucasian

have drawn your chief strength from your Tuscan blood. 112
Recent archaeological excavations in Bagnolo San Vito near Mantua have confirmed
the role of the ancient Etruscan element in the city, which according to a legend had
been a center of Etruscan expansion to the north of the Po river. 113 As to the Etruscan
origin of the name of the city mentioned in Vergil’s lines cited above, it can perhaps be
traced back to Etruscan manEva. 114
4. Names for “horse” in Hurrian, Northern Caucasian and Indo-European.
It seems that one of the first important results of the Mozan/Urkesh excavations, at
least from the point of view of Indo-European studies, was the discovery of a beautiful
sculptural image of a horse head dating from the middle of the third millenium B.C. 115
From much later representations of horses, possibly continuing the same Hurro-
Urartian tradition, one may particularly compare a bronze horse head from Karmir-
Blur (VIII c. B.C.). 116 Subsequent findings in Mozan/Urkesh have shown a number of
horse figurines coming from the storeroom of Tupkish’s palace (about 2200 B.C.), some
of which represent the domesticated animal. 117 These numerous figurines, which
belong to the following period of the history of Urkesh in the last quarter of the III mil.
B.C., make it clear that the horse was extremely important in the life of the society.
Particularly interesting seem horse figurines showing the harness, thus documenting
the use of horses in transportation. 118
112 Mandelbaum 1981, 250.
113 De Marinis 1986-1987; Moscati 1987, 161, 243.
114 Pallottino 1980, 247, 373; on mant(h)- see A. I. Nemirovskij 1983, 174; cf. also the name of the
Etruscan goddess Manturna, Ernout and Meillet 1994. It might be interesting to compare the Urartian
toponym Mantupa (Diakonoff 1951a, 42 (23); Arutiunian 1985, 135-136; on names in -ua in Hurrian, see
Laroche 1966, 354, and in Urartian, Meshchaninov 1925, 45), although the identity of geographical
names in such distant areas is not easy to prove; cf. also Hurrian personal names and toponyms derived
from mant-, Laroche 1966, 113, 350-352; 1980, 166.
115 Buccellati and Kelly-Buccellati 1988, pl. 1.
116 Piotrovskij 1962a, 341, fig. 44. Arutiunian 1964, 187, fig. 39. Other Urartian horse images:
Khodzhash a.o. 1979, fig. 60, 124; Piotrovskij 1962b.
117 See the descriptions and drawings of the figurines in Hauser 1998.
118 Hauser, 1998.