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Urartians were an ancient people who spoke the Urartian language. The territory of the ancient kingdom of Urartu extended over the modern frontiers of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and the Republic of Armenia. Its kings left behind cuneiform inscriptions in the Urartian language, a member of the Hurro-Urartian language family. These languages might have been related to Northeast Caucasian languages. Following Armenian incursions into Urartu, Armenians "imposed their language" on Urartians and became the aristocratic class. The Urartians later "were probably absorbed into the Armenian polity". A related people to the Urartians are the Hurrians.

History and Origin

It is assumed that the Urartians spread across the Armenian highlands from the region of Rewanduz (modern-day northwestern Iran), where the ancient city of Musasir was located.

Since its re-discovery in the 19th century, Urartu, which is commonly believed to have been at least partially Armenian-speaking, has played a significant role in Armenian nationalism. The claim that Urartians were Armenians has no "serious scientific grounds".

Language

Urartian or Vannic is an extinct Hurro-Urartian language which was spoken by the inhabitants of the ancient kingdom of Urartu (Biaini or Biainili in Urartian), (it was also called Nairi), which was centered on the region around Lake Van and had its capital, Tushpa, near the site of the modern town of Van in the Armenian highlands, now in the Eastern Anatolia region of Turkey. Its past prevalence is unknown. While some believe it was probably dominant around Lake Van and in the areas along the upper Zab valley, others believe it was spoken by a relatively small population who comprised a ruling class.

First attested in the 9th century BCE, Urartian ceased to be written after the fall of the Urartian state in 585 BCE and presumably became extinct due to the fall of Urartu. It must have had long contact with, and been gradually totally replaced by, an early form of Armenian, although it is only in the 5th century CE that the first written examples of Armenian appear.

Religion

The religious beliefs of the Urartians shared many similarities with the religions of Mesopotamia. The Urartian pantheon included numerous deities, many of which were borrowed from the religious traditions of Sumer, Akkad and Assyria.

Sacrifices, mainly of animals (bulls and sheep), were practiced, although there is evidence of human sacrifices. Rituals of worship, usually performed in special chambers carved into the rocks, resembled ziggurats. In one such chamber, a tablet was found listing 79 Urartian deities and the number of animals that were to be sacrificed to each of them.

References

1. Kleiss, Wolfram (2008). "URARTU IN IRAN". Encyclopædia Iranica.
2. ^ Zimansky, Paul E. (2011-01-01). "Urartu". The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acref/9780195065121.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-506512-1. Retrieved 2018-11-22.
3. Zimansky, Paul (2012). "Urartian and the Urartians". In McMahon, Gregory; Steadman, Sharon (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Anatolia: (10,000-323 BCE). Oxford University Press. pp. 556–557. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195376142.013.0024. ISBN 978-0-19-537614-2. That Hurro-Urartian as a whole shared a yet earlier common ancestor with some of the numerous and comparatively obscure languages of the Caucasus is not improbable. Modern Caucasian languages are conventionally divided into southern, (north)western, and (north)eastern families (Smeets 1989:260). Georgian, for example, belongs to the southern family. Diakono and Starostin, in the most thorough attempt at finding a linkage yet published, have argued that Hurro-Urartian is a branch of the eastern Caucasian family. This would make it a distant relative of such modern languages as Chechen, Avar, Lak, and Udi (Diakono and Starostin 1986).
4. Chahin, Mack (2013). The Kingdom of Armenia: A history. Caucasus World. Routledge. pp. 109–110. ISBN 978-1-136-85250-3. However, before him, Hecataeus of Miletus was the first to mention 'Armenoi', c. 525 BC, which leaves a gap of a mere 60 years between the end of the kingdom of Van and the first historical evidence of the existence of the state of Armenia. During that period, and the previous generations of infiltrations, conquests and consolidation, the Armenians would properly be described as the ruling aristocracy of those territories (and eventually of the whole of the ancient Kingdom of Urartu), where they imposed their language upon those Urartians who chose to stay (and according to recent findings, there was a large proportion of the population who did so), and even Armenised Urartian names. Those of the Urartians who fled continued to live in the highlands of the upper Araxes ... According to more recent research the Chaldians were a native people of the Chalybes. The Urartians were probably absorbed into the Armenian polity.
5. Smeets, Rieks (1989). "On Hurro-Urartian as an Eastern Caucasian language". Bibliotheca Orientalis. XLVI: 260–280.
6. ^ Barnett R.D. Urartu // Edwards I.E.S., Gadd C.J., Hammond N.G.L., Boardman J. Cambridge Ancient history. — London: Cambridge University Press, 1982. — Vol. 3, part 1. — P. 314—371. — ISBN 0-521-22496-9.
7. Stone E. C., Zimansky P. (2003). "The Urartian Transformation in the Outer Town of Ayanis". Archaeology in the Borderlands. Investigations in Caucasia and beyond. Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 1931745013.
8. Salvini, Mirjo (1995). Geschichte und Kultur der Urartäer. Darmstadt.
9. Melikishvili, G. A. (1948). "Musasir and the Question of the Earliest Habitat of the Urartian Tribes". Bulletin of Ancient History (2): 37–48. This article by Georgian historian G. A. Melikishvili explores the ancient city of Musasir and its significance in understanding the earliest territories inhabited by Urartian tribes. Drawing on historical and archaeological evidence.
10. Diakonoff, Igor M (1992). "First Evidence of the Proto-Armenian Language in Eastern Anatolia". Annual of Armenian Linguistics. 13: 51–54. ISSN 0271-9800.
11. ^ Mallory, J. P.; Adams, Douglas Q., eds. (1997). Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture. London: Fitzroy Dearborn. pp. 30. ISBN 978-1-884964-98-5. OCLC 37931209. Armenian presence in their historical seats should then be sought at some time before c 600 BC; ... Armenian phonology, for instance, appears to have been greatly affected by Urartian, which may suggest a long period of bilingualism.
12. Robert Drews. Militarism and the Indo-Europeanizing of Europe. Routledge. 2017. p. 228. "The vernacular of the Great Kingdom of Biainili was quite certainly Armenian. The Armenian language was obviously the region's vernacular in the fifth century BC, when Persian commanders and Greek writers paired it with Phrygian. That it was brought into the region between the early sixth and the early fifth century BC, and that it immediately obliterated whatever else had been spoken there, can hardly be supposed; ... Because Proto-Armenian speakers seem to have lived not far from Hurrian speakers our conclusion must be that the Armenian language of Mesrop Mashtots was descended from an Indo--European language that had been spoken in southern Caucasia in the Bronze Age."
13. Hrach Martirosyan (2013). "The place of Armenian in the Indo-European language family: the relationship with Greek and Indo-Iranian*" Leiden University. p. 85-86.
14. Petrosyan, Armen. "The Armenian Elements in the Language and Onomastics of Urartu." Aramazd: Armenian Journal of Near Eastern Studies. 2010.
15. Redgate, Anne Elizabeth (2000). The Armenians. Wiley. ISBN 978-0-631-22037-4., p. 276.
16. Areshian, Gregory E. (2019). "Bīsotūn, 'Urartians' and 'Armenians' of the Achaemenid Texts, and the Origins of the Exonyms Armina and Arminiya". In Avetisyan, Pavel S.; Dan, Roberto; Grekyan, Yervand H. (eds.). Over the Mountains and Far Away: Studies in Near Eastern history and archaeology presented to Mirjo Salvini on the occasion of his 80th birthday (PDF). Archaeopress. p. 3. doi:10.2307/j.ctvndv9f0.6. ISBN 978-1-78491-944-3. Never having serious scientific grounds and fulfilling its political goals in 1991, but still littering today school textbooks, this nationalistic paradigmatic concept maintains among a number of other amateurish ideas that 'Urartians' were 'Armenians', without even attempting to explore what 'Urartians' and 'Armenians' could have meant in the 9th-6th centuries BCE, thereby demonstrating a classical example of historical presentism
17. "Urartean". LINGUIST List. Archived from the original on 10 March 2021. Retrieved 5 November 2024.
18. Læssøe, Jørgen (1963). People of Ancient Assyria: Their Inscriptions and Correspondence. Routledge & Kegan Paul. p. 89. ISBN 9781013661396.
19. Wilhelm, Gernot. 2008. Urartian. In Woodard, Roger D. (ed.) The Ancient Languages of Asia Minor. P.105. "Neither its geographical origin can be conclusively determined, nor the area where Urartian was spoken by a majority of the population. It was probably dominant in the mountainous areas along the upper Zab Valley and around Lake Van."
20. Zimansky, Paul (1995). "Urartian Material Culture As State Assemblage: An Anomaly in the Archaeology of Empire". Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. 299/300 (299/300): 103–115. doi:10.2307/1357348. ISSN 0003-097X. JSTOR 1357348. S2CID 164079327. Although virtually all the cuneiform records that survive from Urartu are in one sense or another royal, they provide clues to the existence of linguistic diversity in the empire. There is no basis for the a priori assumption that a large number of people ever spoke Urartian. Urartian words are not borrowed in any numbers by neighboring peoples, and the language disappears from the written record along with the government
21. Wilhelm, Gernot. 2008. Urartian. In Woodard, Roger D. (ed.) The Ancient Languages of Asia Minor. P.106: "We do not know when the language became extinct, but it is likely that the collapse of what had survived of the empire until the end of the seventh or the beginning of the sixth century BCE caused the language to disappear."
22. Petrosyan, Armen. The Armenian Elements in the Language and Onomastics of Urartu. Aramazd: Armenian Journal of Near Eastern Studies. 2010. (https://www.academia.edu/2939663/The_Armenian_Elements_in_the_Language_and_Onomastics_of_Urartu)
23. Igor M. Diakonoff. The Pre-history of the Armenian People. 1968. (http://www.attalus.org/armenian/diakph11.htm)
24. Clackson, James P. T. 2008. Classical Armenian. In: The languages of Asia Minor (ed. R. D. Woodard). P.125. "The extralinguistic facts relevant to the prehistory of the Armenian people are also obscure. Speakers of Armenian appear to have replaced an earlier population of Urartian speakers (see Ch. 10) in the mountainous region of Eastern Anatolia. The name Armenia first occurs in the Old Persian inscriptions at Bīsotūn dated to c. 520 BCE (but note that the Armenians use the ethnonym hay to refer to themselves). We have no record of the Armenian language before the fifth century CE. The Old Persian, Greek, and Roman sources do mention a number of prominent Armenians by name, but unfortunately the majority of these names are Iranian in origin, for example, Dādrši- (in Darius’ Bīsotūn inscription), Tigranes, and Tiridates. Other names are either Urartian (Haldita- in the Bīsotūn inscription) or obscure and unknown in literate times in Armenia (Araxa- in the Bīsotūn inscription)."
25. Piotrovsky B. B. The Kingdom of Van (Urartu) / Edited by I. A. Orbeli. — Moscow: Publishing House of Oriental Literature, 1959. — 286 pp. — 3,500 copies.
26. Lehmann-Haupt C.F. Armenien, einst und jetzt. — Berlin: B. Behr, 1910—1931.
27. König F. W. (1955). Handbuch der chaldischen Inschriften. Graz: E. Weidner. p. 275.

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