Urartu

Urartu (Biainili in Urartian) was an ancient kingdom in eastern Anatolia, centered in the mountainous region around Lake Van (present-day Turkey), which existed from about 1000 BC, or earlier, until 585 BC. The name may correspond to the Biblical Ararat.

Urartu was often called The Kingdom of Ararat in many ancient manuscripts and holy writings of different nations. It was believed to be the site of the Tree of Life and was sought after by various kings in that era.

The reason for uncertainty in the names (i.e. Urartu and Ararat) is due to variations in sources. In fact, the written languages at that time employed only consonants and not vowels. So the word itself in various contemporary sources is "RRT", which could be either Ararat, or Urartu, or Uruarti and so on.

The Kingdom included three main tribal groups living within its territory: Nairi, Hay and Armen. The tribal groups living near Lake Van and, in fact, in and around the capital Touchpa (Tushpa) were called "Nairi" (indicating they had fair hair and eyes). The groups to the West in central Anatolia where known as "Armens". The tribal groups to the East-North where referred to as "Hay".

The Kingdom was known as Armenia to the Greeks living in Western Anatolia, possibly due to that fact the contacts they had with Urartu, were through the people calling themselves Armens, or Armenians. So to Greece, and thereafter to the Roman Empire, the country was known as the land of Armens – Armenia.

In the beginning of the 6th century, The Urartian Kingdom fell under pressure from Assyria to the South and nomad attacks from the North, North-West. Although weakend by incursions, the South-Eastern parts where Hays lived remained unmolested. The Hay took over the rule of that part of Urartu’s territory, remained a viable political entity and regained strength under their own name of “the land of Hays” – Hayq, Hayastan. The western territory remained under the control of the Armens, and was known as Armenia, the name by which it came to be known to the rest of the world.

The aforementioned three main tribal groups had similar languages, cultures, and ethnic origins. These similarities enabled Urartian and early Armenian kings to keep their territory intact and facilitated efforts made to expand their holdings. The kingdom grew in size thereafter and eventually divided into two main parts: Greater Armenia and Lesser Armenia.

At its apogee, Urartu stretched from northern Mesopotamia through the southern Caucasus, including parts of present-day Armenia up to Lake Sevan. Archaeological sites within its boundaries include Altintepe, Toprakkale, Patnos and Cavustepe. Urartu fortresses are found in Van, Armavir, Erebuni (present day Yerevan city), Anzaf, Cavustepe and Başkale, as well as Argishtiqinili, Karmir Blour and others.

Name

The name Urartu is from Assyrian, a dialect of Akkadian, and was given to the kingdom by its chief rivals to the south; it may have meant simply "mountain country". The kingdom was named Biainili by its inhabitants, the origin of the name of Lake Van. The name Urartu apparently corresponds to the Ararat of the Old Testament. Indeed, Mount Ararat is located in ancient Urartian territory, approximately 120 km north of its former capital. Some scholars such as C. F. Lehmann-Haupt (1910) believe that the people of Urartu called themselves Khaldini after their god Khaldi, or that they were related to the Khaldi of the Black Sea coast. The Nairi, an Iron Age people of the Van area, are sometimes considered related or identical.

Discovery

Friedrich Eduard Schulz travelled to the Van area in 1827 on behalf of the French Oriental Society, inspired by accounts of queen Šamiram) by the 5th century Armenian historian Moses of Chorene. Schulz discovered the ruins of a city and numerous inscriptions, partly in Assyrian, partly in a hitherto unknown language. Schulze also re-discovered the Kelišin, an Assyrian-Urartian bilingue located on the Kelišin pass on the Iraqi-Iranian border. Schulz was killed by Kurds in 1829 near Baskale and parts of his notes were lost. In 1828, British Assyriologist Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson attempted to copy the inscription on the stele, but failed because of the ice on the stele's face. German scholar R. Rosch made a similar attempt a few years later, but he and his party were assaulted and killed. Sir Austen Henry Layard in the late 1840s described the rock tombs of Van-Kelesi and the Argišti chamber. From the 1870s, local residents began to plunder the Toprakkale ruins, selling artefacts to European scholars.

The first systematic collection of Urartian inscriptions was accomplished by Sir Archibald Henry Sayce, dating to the 1870s. German engineer Karl Sester, discoverer of Nimrud Dag collected more inscriptions in 1890/1.

Waldemar Belck visited the area in 1891, discovering the Rusa stele. A further expedition planned for 1893 was prevented by Turkish-Armenian hostilities. Belck together with Carl Ferdinand Friedrich Lehmann-Haupt visited the area again in 1898/9, excavating Toprakkale. On this expedition, Belck reached the Kelishin stele, but he was attacked by Kurds and barely escaped with his life. Belck and Lehmann-Haupt reached the stele again in a second attempt, but were again prevented from copying the inscription by weather conditions. After another assault on Belck provoked the diplomatic intervention of Wilhelm II, the regional ruler, Sultan Abdulhamid II, agreed to pay Belck a sum of 80,000 gold marks in reparation. During World War I, the area came under Russian control. In 1916, Russian scholars Nikolaj Jakovlevich Marr and Iosif Abgarovich Orbeli discovered a four-faced stele carrying the annals of Sarduri II. Boris Borisovich Piotrovskij in 1939 excavated Karmir-Blur, discovering Teišebai, the city of the god of war, Teišeba. In 1938-40, excavations by American scholars at Kirsoop and Silva Lake were cut short by World War II, and most of their finds were sunk when a German submarine torpedoed their ship. Athenia. The surviving documents were published by Manfred Korfmann in 1977. Following the war, excavations were at first restricted to Soviet Armenia. beginning in 1956 Charles Burney excavated in the Van area, and from 1959, Turkish expeditions under Tahsin Özgüç excavated Altintepe and Arif Erzen.

In 1976, an Italian party led by Mirjo Salvini finally reached the Kelishin stele, accompanied by a massive military escort. The First Gulf War again closed the area to archaeological research. After the Gulf War, O. Belli resumed excavation on Turkish territory. In 1989, a 7th c. BC fortress built by Rusa II was discovered 35 km north of Van. In spite of resumed excavations, only a third to half of the 300 known Urartian sites in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Armenia have been examined by archeologists (Wartke 1993). Without protection of these sites, local residents will continue to plunder them, taking advantage of the lucrative black market trade.

History

Origins

Assyrian inscriptions of Shalmaneser I (ca. 1270 BC) first mention a loose confederation called the Uruartri or Nairi in North-East Anatolia, in the region around Lake Van. They were repeatedly subjected to attacks by the Assyrians, especially under Tukulti-Ninurta I (ca. 1240 BC), Tiglath-Pileser I (ca. 1100 BC), Ashur-bel-kala (ca. 1070 BC), Adad-nirari II (ca. 900), Tukulti-Ninurta II (ca. 890), and Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 BC). These towns or tribes became a unified kingdom under king Aramu (ca. 860-843 BC), whose capital at Arzashkun was captured by Shalmaneser III. Roughly contemporaries of the Uruartri, living just to the west along the southern shore of the Black Sea, were the Kaskas known from Hittite sources.

Main period

Sardur I (ca. 832-820 BC), son of Lutipri, seems to have been a usurper who founded the main dynasty. He moved the capital to the ancient city of Tushpa (modern Van, on the shore of Lake Van), fortifying it. His son, Ispuini (ca. 820-800 BC) annexed the neighbouring state of Musasir and made his son Sarduri II viceroy; Ispuini was in turn attacked by Shamshi-Adad V. His successor Menua (ca. 800-785 BC) also enlarged the kingdom greatly and left inscriptions over a wide area. Argishtish I (ca. 785-760 BC) added more territories along the Araxes river and Lake Erivan, and frustrated Shalmaneser IV's campaigns against him.

At its height, the Urartu kingdom may have stretched North beyond the Aras River (Greek Araxes) and Lake Sevan, encompassing present-day Armenia and even the southern part of Georgia (Diauehi and Qulha) almost to the shores of the Black Sea; west to the sources of the Euphrates; east to present-day Tabriz, Lake Urmia, and beyond; and south to the sources of the Tigris.

Decline

In 714 BC, the Urartu kingdom suffered heavily from Cimmerian raids and the campaigns of Sargon II. The main temple at Mushashir was sacked, and the Urartian king Rusa I was defeated by Sargon at Lake Urmia.

Urartu was then invaded by Scythians from the north, and finally conquered by the Scythians' associates, the Medes, in 612 BC. Many Urartu ruins show evidence of destruction by fire. Even before the Urartian empire came to an end, Armenians had been mixing with the Urartians. But it was not until the demise of Urartu, that the Urartians adopted the Indo-European Armenian language and the Armenians adopted certain aspects of Urartian social, politcal and cultural institutions. The Urartians thus became the Armenians and vice versa.

Archaeological rediscovery

The existence of Urartu was forgotten by the 5th century AD. It was not rediscovered until historical and archaeological work done in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, before which Urartian ruins were generally assumed to be Assyrian.

Economy and politics

The people of Urartu were mostly farmers. They were experts in stone architecture; they may have introduced the blind arch to the Near East, and their houses may have been the precursor of the Persian apadana layout. They were also experts in metalworking, and exported metal vessels to Phrygia and Etruria. Excavations have yielded two-storied residential houses with internal wall decorations, windows, and balconies. Their towns generally had well-developed water supply (often taken from far away) and sewage systems.

Their king was also the chief-priest or envoy of Khaldi, their major deity. Some temples to Khaldi were part of the royal palace complex while others were independent structures. Other deities included Teisheba, god of the heavens (the Teshshub of the Hurrians and Khurits), and Shiwini, the sun goddess.

Language

The Urartians spoke an agglutinative language, conventionally called Urartian, which was related to Hurrian in the Hurro-Urartian family, and was neither Semitic nor Indo-European. It had close linguistic similarities to Northeast Caucasian languages. Igor Diakonov even places it in the Alarodian family, based on linguistic similarities with Northeast Caucasian languages. A more distant connection between Urartian and the modern Georgian language has been postulated as well.

The Urartu language was originally written using locally-developed hieroglyphics, but the Urartians adapted the Assyrian cuneiform script for most purposes. After the 8th century BC, the hieroglyphic script was restricted to religious and accounting purposes. Currently, samples of Urartian written language have survived in many inscriptions found in the area of Urartu kingdom.

The Urartian legacy

The language and mythology of Urartu had important influence over the languages and cultures of Armenia and Georgia. Urartu had absorbed a large influx of Armenians, while some modern Armenians claim descent from the Urartians; and it seems that both Armenians and the Urartians had a major link with the Hurrians. There is no question that the Hurrian and Urartian languages were very similar, and some have used this as evidence that the Hurrian peoples of Syrian Mesopotamia had origins in the Urartu area. However, given that the Hurrian timeframe in Syria (c. 2300-1200 BC) predates the timeframe of Urartu in Armenia (c. 1000-585), it is more often considered likely that the peoples of Urartu had origins in Syria, and fled from Mesopotamia into the mountains after the Hittites and Assyrians conquered the region. Chronologically, the Urartian language seems to be a continuation of Hurrian dialects, and not the other way around. Thus the relationship between the Armenians and the Hurro-Urartians is similar to that of the Romans with the Etruscans, or that of the Greeks with the Minoans and other Pelasgians.

Literature

M. Chahin, The Kingdom of Armenia: A History, Routledge, London, 2001.
C. F. Lehmann-Haupt, Armenien - Einst und Jetzt, Berlin 1910.
Giorgi Melikishvili, Nairi-Urartu (a monograph in Russian), Tbilisi, 1955.
Giorgi Melikishvili, About the history of ancient Georgia (a monograph in Russian), Tbilisi, 1959.
Boris B. Piotrovsky, The Ancient Civilization of Urartu (tranlated from Russian by James Hogarth), New York:Cowles Book Company, 1969.
M. Salvini, Geschichte und Kultur der Urartäer, Darmstadt 1995.
R.-B. Wartke, Urartu - Das Reich am Ararat In: Kulturgeschichte der Antiken Welt, Bd. 59, Mainz 1993.
P.E. Zimansky, Ecology and Empire: The Structure of the Urartian State, in Ancient Oriental Civilization, Chicago: Oriental Institute, 1985.
P.E. Zimansky, Acient Ararat. A Handbook of Urartian Studies, New York 1998.

External links

An Urartian Ozymandias - article by Paul Zimansky, Biblical Archaeologist
Nairi/Urartu (A very detailed site)
Urartu Civilization
Urartu (Greek Ararat)
In war and peace The Urartians
Capital and Periphery in the Kingdom of Urartu, Yehuda Dagan, Israel Antiquities Authority

Urartu | History of Armenia

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