A kingdom in northern Mesopotamia and Syria which arose in the foothills between the Tigris and Euphrates c 1500 BC, the most important of the 2nd millennium BC Hurrian kingdoms with Indo-European elements in its elite society and rulers. Its capital of Wassukkanni has not been identified. At its height the empire extended from Kirkuk (ancient Arrapkha) and the Zagros Mountains in the east through Assyria to the Mediterranean Sea in the west. It flourished for a little over a century, treated on near-equal terms with Egypt and the Hittites, until overthrown by the Hittites c 1370 BC and then the Assyrians. (It had formed a buffer zone between the kingdoms of the Hittites and the Assyrians.) Its people were mainly Hurri, but its ruling dynasty, from the form of their names and more especially from the gods they invoke in an extant treaty, were Indo-Europeans related to the roughly contemporary Aryans of India. Mitannian style associated with works of northern Syria and Iraq from 16th-14th centuries BC and even later, for the style survived after the fall of the Mitanni empire.