The Turukkaeans were likely a Bronze and Iron Age tribe of Hurrians, who lived south of Lake Urmia in the northwestern Zagros Mountains. Their endonym has sometimes been reconstructed as Tukri.
History
Origins The region of Turukkum, which was located south of Lake Urmia in the valleys of the northwestern Zagros mountains, consisted of different kingdoms with a population that was predominantly Hurrian and significantly Semitic. The Turukkaeans are considered by most scholars today to have been a Hurrian and Hurrian-speaking tribe, often commanded by Hurrian military leaders.
Middle Bronze Turukkum was regarded by the Kingdom of Upper Mesopotamia as a constant threat, during the reign of Amorite Shamshi-Adad I (1813-1782 BCE) and his son and successor Ishme-Dagan I (1781-1750 BCE). The Turukkaeans were allied to the Land of Ahazum, and they gathered at the town of Ikkallum to face the army of Ishme-Dagan, as Shamshi-Adad wrote in a letter to his other son Yasmah-Adad. Ishme-Dagan destroyed the army reporting "Not one man escaped".Sasson, Jack M., "Warfare", From the Mari Archives: An Anthology of Old Babylonian Letters, University Park, USA: Penn State University Press, pp. 181-214, 2015
The Turukkaeans were reported to have sacked the city of Mardaman, apparently under Hurrian rule, around the year 1769/68 BCE. Babylon's defeat of Turukku was celebrated in the 37th year of Hammurabi's reign (c. 1773 BCE).
A significant early reference to them is an inscription by the Babylonian king Hammurabi, (r. circa 1792 – c. 1752 BCE) that mentions a kingdom named Tukriš (UET I l. 46, iii–iv, 1–4), alongside Gutium, Subartu and another name that is usually reconstructed as Elam. Other texts from the same period refer to the kingdom as Tukru.
Iron Age By the early part of the 1st millennium BCE, names such as Turukkum, Turukku and ti-ru-ki-i are being used for the same region. In a broader sense, names such as Turukkaean been used in a generic sense to mean "mountain people" or "highlanders".
Tukru or Turukkum was said to have spanned the north-east edge of Mesopotamia and an adjoining part of the Zagros Mountains. In particular, they were associated with the Lake Urmia basin and the valleys of the north-east Zagros. They were therefore located north of ancient Lullubi, and at least one Neo-Assyrian (9th to 7th centuries BCE) text refers to the whole area and its peoples as "Lullubi-Turukki" (VAT 8006).
Culture In terms of cultural and linguistic characteristics, little is known about the Tukri. They are described by their contemporaries as a semi-nomadic, mountain tribe, who wore animal skins. According to , "The Turukka people evidently belonged to those late-gentile groups in which the primitive social conditions had already decayed and tribal leaders exercised a permanent function due to close contact, partly established through economic pressure, with the state-organized population practicing rain-fed agriculture in the Rania Plain and the Zagros foothills."
See also Gutian dynasty of Sumer Sumerian King List Gutian language
Footnotes
Bibliography German Archaeological Institute. Department of Tehran Archaeological releases from Iran, Volume 19, Dietrich Reimer, 1986 Wayne Horowitz, Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography. Winona Lake; Eisenbrauns, 1998. Jesper Eidem, Jørgen Læssøe, The Shemshara archives, Volume 23. Copenhagen, Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, 2001. Jörgen Laessøe, The Shemshāra Tablets. Copenhagen, 1959. Jörgen Laessøe, "The Quest for the Country of *Utûm", Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1968, vol. 88, no. 1, pp. 120–122.
Victor Harold Matthews, Pastoral nomadism in the Mari Kingdom (ca. 1830-1760 B.C.). American Schools of Oriental Research, 1978. Peter Pfälzner, Keilschrifttafeln von Bassetki lüften Geheimnis um Königsstadt Mardaman (webpage; German language), University of Tubingen, 2018. Daniel T. Potts, Nomadism in Iran: From Antiquity to the Modern Era. Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2014.