The Hurrians

Gernot Wilhelm's The Hurrians is a scholarly history of the ancient Hurrian people and their civilization in the ancient Near East, published by Aris and Phillips, an academic press specializing in classical and Near Eastern texts. Wilhelm is a recognized specialist in Hurrian language and history, and the book's authority rests on his direct command of the cuneiform textual sources, a genuinely specialized skill given how comparatively little Hurrian material survives next to better documented neighboring civilizations like Assyria and Babylon. Its concise scope reflects the state of the surviving evidence rather than an incomplete treatment. Its limit is the ordinary one for a compact survey, useful as the standard English language introduction to the Hurrians, while a very specific philological question about a Hurrian text benefits from the specialist journal literature Wilhelm's own bibliography points toward.