| Gutian | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Gutium |
| Region | Zagros Mountains? |
| Ethnicity | Guti |
| Era | Bronze Age (EBA IV) |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | None (mis) |
6og | |
| Glottolog | guti1235 |
 Near East in the 3rd millennium BCE | |
Gutian (/ˈɡuːtiən/) is an extinctunclassified language that was spoken by theGutian people, who briefly ruled overSumer as theGutian dynasty in the 22nd century BCE. The Gutians lived in the territory between theZagros Mountains and theTigris. Nothing is known about the language except its existence and a list of names of Gutian rulers in theSumerian King List, which may reflect elements of the language.
The Gutian language lacks atextual corpus and contemporary sources provide few details about the language, providing only a list of ruler names from theGutian rule in Mesopotamia in theSumerian King List and a single mention of ruler Sharlag in a year name of Akkadian Empire rulerShar-kali-sharri.[1][2] Different Sumerian King List manuscripts record different Gutian kings in different orders. Some names may be from other groups, and the transmission of the names is unreliable.[3]
Thorkild Jacobsen suggested that the recurring ending-(e)š may have had a grammatical function in Gutian, perhaps as acase marker.[4]
Gutian is included in a list of languages spoken in the region found in theSag B tablet, an educational text from the Middle Babylonian period possibly originating from the city ofEmar. This text also listsAkkadian,Amorite,Sutean, "Subarean" (Hurrian) andElamite.[5] There is also a mention of "an interpreter for the Gutean language" in a tablet fromAdab.[6]
In a posthumously-published article,W. B. Henning suggested that the different endings of the king names resembledcase endings in theTocharian languages, a branch ofIndo-European known from texts found in theTarim Basin (in the northwest of modern China) dating from the 6th to 8th centuries CE.[7] Henning also pointed to the phonological similarity of the name Guti toKuči, the native name of the Tocharian city ofKucha. He also stated that the Chinese nameYuezhi, referring tonomadic pastoralists living in the grasslands to the northeast of the Tarim in the 2nd century BCE, could be reconstructed asGu(t)-t'i.[7] However, this name is usually reconstructed with an initial *ŋʷ- inOld Chinese.[8] Henning also compared the name of a country calledTukriš, listed with Gutium and other neighbouring countries in an inscription ofHammurabi, with the nametwγry found in anOld Turkish manuscript from the early 9th century CE, which is thought to refer to the Tocharians.[7] Most scholars rejected the attempt to compare languages separated by more than two millennia.[9]
