Indo-Aryan superstrate in Mitanni

It is thus generally believed that Indo-Aryan peoples settled in Upper Mesopotamia and northern Syria, and established the kingdom of Mitanni following a period of political vacuum, while also adopting Hurrian. This is considered a part of the Indo-Aryan migrations.

Linguistic context

Some personal names of deities, proper names, and other terminology of the Late Bronze Age Mitanni civilisation of Upper Mesopotamia exhibit an Indo-Aryan superstrate. While what few written records left by the Mittani are either in Hurrian (which appears to have been the predominant language of their kingdom) or Akkadian (the main diplomatic language of the Late Bronze Age Near East), these apparently Indo-Aryan names suggest that an Indo-Aryan elite imposed itself over the Hurrians in the course of the Indo-Aryan expansion. If these traces are Indo-Aryan, they would be the earliest known direct evidence of Indo-Aryan, and would increase the precision in dating the split between the Indo-Aryan and Iranian languages (as the texts in which the apparent Indicisms occur can be dated with some accuracy).

Scholarship has reached a consensus that the linguistic data is most certainly affiliated to the Indo-Iranian language family, more specifically to Indo-Aryan. Professor Eva von Dassow concurs with the presence of Indo-Aryan terms in Mitanni vocabulary, but cautiously advises against the notion of an "Indo-Aryan takeover". Michael Witzel argues for the antiquity of the Indo-Aryan words attested in the Mitanni data, since they almost certainly predate linguistic developments attested in the Rigveda. In the same vein, German linguist Martin Joachim Kümmel divides the Indo-Aryan elements into WIA (Western Indo-Aryan) and (E)IA ((Eastern) Indo-Aryan), the latter "being slightly less archaic than WIA".