The Amoritic-Hurrian kingdom of Yamhad in northern Syria is recorded as struggling for this area with the early Hittite king Hattusilis I around 1600 BCE.

Hurrians also settle in the coastal region of Adaniya in the country of Kizzuwatna.

Yamhad eventually weakens, falling to the powerful Hittites, but this also opens Hittite-dominated Anatolia to Hurrian cultural influences, which will obtain over the course of several centuries.The Hittites continue expanding south after the defeat of Yamhad.

The army of the Hittite king Mursili I makes its way down to Babylon and sacks the city.

The destruction of the Babylonian kingdom, as well as the kingdom of Yamhad, helps the rise of another Hurrian dynasty: the kingdom of Mitanni, established around 1500 BCE, which gradually grows from the region around the Khabur valley.

Another Hurrian kingdom also benefits from the demise of Babylonian power in the sixteenth century BCE: Hurrians who inhabit the region northeast of river Tigris, around the modern Kirkuk, establish the kingdom of Arrapha, yet by the mid-fifteenth century BCE they have become vassals of the Great King of Mitanni, the most powerful kingdom of the Near East in c.1450-1350 BCE, having uniting the warring Hurrian tribes and city states under one dynasty.