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The Guti (/ˈɡuːti/) or Quti, also known by the derived exonyms Gutians or Guteans, were a nomadic people of the Zagros Mountains (on the border of modern Iran and Iraq) during ancient times. Their homeland was known as Gutium (Sumerian: Gu-tu-umki or Gu-ti-umki) The Guti are often regarded as precursors of the modern Kurds.
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Conflict between people from Gutium and the Akkadian Empire has been linked to the collapse of the empire, towards the end of the 3rd Millennium BCE. The Guti subsequently overran southern Mesopotamia and formed a royal dynasty in Sumer. The Sumerian king list suggests that the Guti ruled over Sumer for several generations, following the fall of the Akkadian Empire.
By the 1st Millennium BCE, usage of the name Gutium, by the peoples of lowland Mesopotamia, had expanded to include all of western Media, between the Zagros and the Tigris. Various tribes and places to the east and northeast were often referred to as Gutians or Gutium. For example, Assyrian royal annals use the term Gutians in relation to populations known to have been Medes or Mannaeans. As late as the reign of Cyrus the Great of Persia, the famous general Gubaru (Gobryas) was described as the "governor of Gutium".
Origin
Little is known of the origins, material culture or language of the Guti, as contemporary sources provide few details and no artifacts have been positively identified. As the Gutian language lacks a text corpus, apart from some proper names, its similarities to other languages are impossible to verify. The names of Gutian-Sumerian kings, suggest that the language was not closely related to any languages of the region, including Sumerian, Akkadian, Hurrian, Hittite and Elamite.
W. B. Henning suggested that the different endings of the king names resembled case endings in the Tocharian languages, a branch of Indo-European known from texts found in the Tarim Basin (in the northwest of modern China) dating from the 6th to 8th centuries CE, making Gutian the earliest documented Indo-European language. He further suggested that they had subsequently migrated to the Tarim. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov explored Henning's suggestion as possible support for their proposal of an Indo-European Urheimat in the Near East. However, most scholars reject the attempt to compare languages separated by more than two millennia.
History
Since Gutian appears to have been a unwritten language, for information about the Guti, scholars must rely on external sources – often highly-biased texts composed by their enemies.
Initially, according to the Sumerian king list, "in Gutium ... no king was famous; they were their own kings and ruled thus for three [or five] years". This may indicate that the Gutian kingship was rotated between tribes/clans, or within an oligarchical elite. Sumerian sources generally portray the Guti as an "unhappy", barbarous and rapacious people from the mountains – apparently the central Zagros east of Babylon and north of Elam. The period of the Gutian dynasty in Sumer is portrayed as chaotic.
The Guti appear in texts from Old Babylonian copies of inscriptions ascribed to Lugal-Anne-Mundu of Adab as among the nations providing his empire tribute. These inscriptions locate them between Subartu in the north, and Marhashe and Elam in the south. They were a prominent nomadic tribe who lived in the Zagros mountains in the time of the Akkadian Empire.
Sargon the Great (r. circa 2340 – 2284 BCE) also mentions them among his subject lands, listing them between Lullubi, Armanum and Akkad to the north, and Nikku and Der to the south. According to one stele, Naram-Sin of Akkad's army of 360,000 soldiers defeated the Gutian king Gula'an, despite having 90,000 slain by the Gutians.
The epic Cuthaean Legend of Naram-Sin of a later millennium mentions Gutium among the lands around Mesopotamia raided by Annubanini of Lulubum during Naram-Sin's reign (c. 2254–2218 BCE). Contemporary year-names for Shar-kali-sharri of Akkad indicate that in one unknown year of his reign, he captured Sharlag king of Gutium, while in another year, "the yoke was imposed on Gutium".
As the Akkadians went into decline, the Gutians began to practice hit-and-run tactics on Mesopotamia; they would be long gone by the time forces could arrive to deal with the situation. Their raids crippled the economy of Sumer. Travel became unsafe, as did work in the fields, resulting in famine. The Gutians eventually overran Akkad, and as the King List tells us, their army also subdued Uruk for hegemony of Sumer, in about 2147–2050 BCE. However, it seems that autonomous rulers soon arose again in a number of city-states, notably Gudea of Lagash.
The Gutians seem also to have briefly overrun Elam at around the same time, towards the close of Kutik-Inshushinak's reign (c. 2100 BCE). On a statue of the Gutian king Erridupizir at Nippur, an inscription imitates his Akkadian predecessors, styling him "King of Gutium, King of the Four Quarters".
The Weidner Chronicle (written c. 500 BCE), portrays the Gutian kings as uncultured and uncouth:
Naram-Sin destroyed the people of Babylon, so twice Marduk summoned the forces of Gutium against him. Marduk gave his kingship to the Gutian force. The Gutians were unhappy people unaware how to revere the gods, ignorant of the right cultic practices.
Utu-hengal, the fisherman, caught a fish at the edge of the sea for an offering. That fish should not be offered to another god until it had been offered to Marduk, but the Gutians took the boiled fish from his hand before it was offered, so by his august command, Marduk removed the Gutian force from the rule of his land and gave it to Utu-hengal.
The Sumerian ruler Utu-hengal of Uruk is similarly credited on the King List with defeating the Gutian ruler Tirigan, and removing the Guti from the country (ca. 2050 BCE (short)).
Following this, Ur-Nammu of Ur had their homeland of Gutium devastated, though according to one lengthy Sumerian poem, he died in battle with the Gutians, after having been abandoned by his own army.
A Babylonian text from the early 2nd Millennium refers to the Guti as having a "human face, dogs’ cunning, [and] monkey's build".
Biblical scholars believe that the Guti may be the "Koa" (qôa), named with the Shoa and Pekod as enemies of Jerusalem in Ezekiel 23:23, which was probably written in the 6th Century BCE.Qôa also means "male camel" in Hebrew, and in the context of Ezekiel 23, it may be a deliberate, insulting distortion of an endonym such as Quti.
Physical appearance
According to the historian Henry Hoyle Howorth (1901), Assyriologist Theophilus Pinches (1908), renowned archaeologist Leonard Woolley (1929) and Assyriologist Ignace Gelb (1944) the Gutians were pale in complexion and blonde. This was asserted on the basis of assumed links to peoples mentioned in the Old Testament. This identification of the Gutians as fair haired first came to light when Julius Oppert (1877) published a set of tablets he had discovered which described Gutian (and Subarian) slaves as namrum or namrûtum, one of its many meanings being "light colored". This racial character of the Gutians as blondes or being light skinned was also claimed up by Georges Vacher de Lapouge in 1899 and later by historian Sidney Smith in his Early history of Assyria (1928).
Ephraim Avigdor Speiser however criticised the translation of namrum as "light colored". An article was published by Speiser in the Journal of the American Oriental Society criticizing Gelb's translation and consequent interpretation. Gelb in response accused Speiser of circular reasoning. In response Speiser claimed the scholarship regarding the translation of namrum or namrûtum is unresolved. Modern scholars now don't regard the Gutians as fair skinned for lack of any proof as the only proof was the translation of a word.
Modern connection theories
The historical Guti have been regarded by some as among the ancestors of the Kurds.
However, the term Guti had by late antiquity become a "catch all" term to describe all tribal peoples in the Zagros region, and according to J.P. Mallory, the original Gutians precede the arrival of Indo-Iranian peoples (of which the Kurds are one) by some 1500 years.
In the late 19th-century, Assyriologist Julius Oppert sought to connect the Gutians of remote antiquity with the later Gutones (Goths), whom Ptolemy in 150 AD had known as the "Guti", a tribe of Scandia. Oppert's theory on this connection is not shared by any scholars today.