Comparative Notes on Hurro-Urartian, Northern Caucasian

XXX III 106 21). 405 In a damaged passage in the beginning of the same description (ib. 3-
7), a logographic denotation of a military chariot is used twice in the same context (with
the same verbs); after its second use, the word ti-ya-ri-ta appears before the verb ni-
ni-in-ki-iÍ[-ki-iz-zi] “he is winding up”, which should refer to the yoke or the horse
team.
Hurrian tiyarit “spindle, chariot” is cognate with Western Northern Caucasian
*t:arPdP > Proto-Abkhaz-Tapant *darPdP > Abkhaz (a)-dardP “spindle” (Bzyb dialect a-
dPrdP), Abaza dadPr-; the Eastern Northern Caucasian forms (*tîrungV “spindle” >
Dargwa *duruk > durug, Lezghian *tinug > Archi tung “spindle’s pivot”), though
comparable to Indo-European *tork w - “spindle” 406 , are definitely far from the Hurrian
word. In this rare case, the Hurrian form coincides with the Western Caucasian and not
with the Eastern one. The Hurrian and Western Caucasian words (in which the second
*-d- might be due to assimilation) may also suggest parallels in Greek troxÒw “wheel,
potter’s wheel”, Armenian durgn “potter’s wheel”, Genitive drgan < *dhrôgh-; Old
Irish drogh “wheel”. 407 It seems that when the idea of rotary motion was discovered, its
early technological applications, as well as corresponding terms, spread among the
Indo-Europeans and their neighbors who spoke Northern Caucasian dialects; the form
may show a relatively later dialectal level of borrowing.
405 The word for palace gate kaÍkaÍtipa- (from Hattic, cf. Hattic aÍka- “gate”, Ivanov 1985, 43) was
written with the wrong sign (-ya- instead of -pa-, which both contain similar parallel horizontal
cuneiform lines), probably a scribal error. The whole section dealing with this passage in Starke 1990,
219-220, is wrong, since the meaning of the word is known and is not a hapax. For a text describing the
appearance of a royal vehicle (ßuluganni-) coming from the palace gate (kaÍkaÍtipa-), see: I Bo T I 36 I
8, 67; II 26-28; IV 27, Jakob-Rost 1965, 182-184; Ardzinba 1982, 143, 147, 219, n.191; Alp 1983, 106-11.
Starke’s remark on the chariot of Teshop is correct but should be applied directly to the text (without
the unnecessarily complicated metaphorical scheme).
406 On this comparison and on Northern Caucasian, see: Starostin 1985, 85-86, 89; Nikolayev and
Starostin 1994, 993. According to Abaev 1949, 313; 1989, 65, the Abkhazian word is derived from Ossetic
waerdaert(t) “a heavy ring put on the spindle to make it stable” < *vartaEra- “rotating instrument” (cf.
Yagnobi watra “mini-spindle”). If it is an old borrowing in Hurrian like the word for fire (see above),
the source should be Proto-Iranian, and the change due to the reshaping of the beginning of the word
has to be ascribed to Proto-Western Caucasian, making this hypothesis tenuous.
407 On the Indo-European word, see Adams and Mallory 1997, 640-641.