[Verginius Rufus]

Interesting. The Mitanni kingdom spoke the Hurrian language (unrelated to the Indo-European or Semitic language families, with no living relatives spoken today), but their kings had Old Indic names, suggesting that the rulers were Indo-Iranian in origin and had conquered a Hurrian-speaking country, but lost their own language. There is a Mitanni manual for horse-training which has some terms of Indo-European origin and the Mitanni kings worshipped some of the gods mentioned in the Rig Veda.

[SunkenCiv]

[snip] The fourth language written in cuneiform on the tablets of the Ras Shamra library is called Khar... It appears to have been the local language, the language of the government and of a large part of the population... Before the excavations of Ras Shamra, frequent mention of "Khr" had already been encountered... Akkadian texts speak of "Khurri," and in Egyptian documents a part of Syria is often called "Kharu"... it was found that one of the letters of the [Amarna] archives was written, apart from the introduction, in an unknown tongue. This letter, written by Tushratta, king of Mitanni, dealt in its six hundred lines with some matters interpreted with the help of other letters, and the language was deciphered. At first it was called Mitannian, but later changed to Subarean. Then in the state archives of Boghazkeui in eastern Anatolia letters were found in a similar tongue, and its name was given as Khri. The people who spoke this language were called Khr... and accordingly the people are called Hurrians or Hurrites. The language of these people has been studiied by linguists... but the historians know nothing of their history... not Semitic, but neither were they Indo-Iranian. Then the writings in alphabetic Khar of Ras Shamra came to light... the scribes who wrote in Khar were versed ina number of other languages as well, and wore themselves out in lexicographic study ("several rooms" in the libaray of Nikmed "contained only dictionaries and lexicons"). [/snip]

Immanuael Velikovsky, "Ages in Chaos", pp 196-198 (1952)