Turukkaeans

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.

[1] Turukkum seems to have been made up of a collection of kingdoms with mixed populations, mostly Hurrian but also heavily Semitic, much like the earlier Lullubi of the same region.

Tukru or Turukkum was said to have spanned the north-east edge of Mesopotamia and an adjoining part of the Zagros Mountains.

They were therefore located north of ancient Lullubi, and at least one Neo-Assyrian (10th to 7th centuries BCE) text refers to the whole area and its peoples as "Lullubi-Turukki" (VAT 8006).

[4] According to Horst Klengel [de], "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.

A map of Mesopotamia and south-western Iran during the 2nd Millennium BCE. The Tukri are generally believed to have been located immediately north of Lullubi (top centre of the map) during this period.