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The Maryannu were a caste of chariot-mounted hereditary warrior nobility that existed in many of the societies of the Ancient Near East during the Bronze Age. Maryannu is a Hurrianized Indo-Aryan word, formed by adding Hurrian suffix -nni to Indo-Aryan root márya, meaning "(young) man"[1] or a "young warrior".[2] Philologist Martin West suggested that the name Meriones, a character in Homeric epic, is "identical" to maryannu.[3] Thus, Mērionēs would be the Homeric Greek version of the term, reflected in pre-Mycenaean poetic verse as Mārionās.[4]
The term is attested in the Amarna letters written by Haapi. The majority of the Maryannu had Semitic and Hurrian names.[5][6]
- ^ von Dassow, Eva, (2014). "Levantine Polities under Mittanian Hegemony". In: Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum, Nicole Brisch and Jesper Eidem (eds.). Constituent, Confederate, and Conquered Space: The Emergence of the Mittani State, p. 27
- ^ Drews, Robert (1994). The Coming of the Greeks: Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. 59. ISBN 978-0-691-02951-1. Retrieved 22 July 2019.
- ^ West, Martin L. (1997). The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth. Oxford: Clarendon Press. p. 612. ISBN 0-19-815042-3.
- ^ Teffeteller, Annette (2001). "Greek Athena and the Hittite Sungoddess of Arinna". In Susan Deacy; Alexandra Villing (eds.). Athena in the Classical World. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. p. 355. doi:10.1163/9789004497290_022.
- ^ Drews, p. 155
- ^ Watson, Janet; Khan, Geoffrey (2011). The Semitic Languages An International Handbook. De Gruyter. ISBN 9783110251586.