Musasir, the spiritual center of the Kingdom of Van

One of the oldest cities of Armenia, the legendary Mutsatsir or Musasir, was for many centuries the main religious-spiritual center of the Kingdom of Van (Urartu), its throne city, where the kings of Van were crowned. Debates about the location of Mutsatsir continue to this day. I have localized this city in my Atlas of Armenia, which is currently being prepared for printing.

Mutsatsir was located in the far south of Greater Armenia, in the eponymous district (gavarake) of the Aigark Korchayk ashkhar gavar, in the lower interfluve of the two left tributaries of the large Akhvak or Great Zav river – the Nairi (Nikhorakan, Shamdinan) and Arbush (in the lower course Ave Marek), on the right bank of the tributary of the latter – the Ardos river (Ave Ardosh), 8 km to the northeast of the village still bearing the name of the ancient city, namely – the village of Mudzhadjir or Mazizhor, which is now in the far north of Iraqi Kurdistan.

It is at the aforementioned place that extensive ruins of the once magnificent Mutsatsir are located. So magnificent that for the second hundred years, in the absence of Armenians, Kurds continue to use the Armenian name.

The first written evidence of Mutsatsir is the cuneiform script of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II, carved in 879 BC on a rock near Mount Nemrut on the western shore of Lake Van. In 714 BC, the city was captured, looted and destroyed by the Assyrian king Sargon II. He attached great importance to the capture of Mutsatsir, since it was here that the kings of Van were crowned, and after the fall of the city, the Kingdom of Van weakened to a critical degree.

The coronation took place in the temple of the god Aika or Khaldi (Ardini) erected in Mutsatsir – one of the oldest temples of Armenia, the splendor of which could compete with the main temple cities of the country – Ashtishat and Til. The capture and looting of the Aika-Khaldi temple is captured in a bas-relief on one of the walls of Sargon’s palace in Dur-Sharrukin (Dur-Sarugan).

According to Rafael Ishkhanyan, “this image gives us today an idea of one of the wonderful examples of the most ancient architecture of Armenia. The stone-built temple is adorned with columns on which rests a triangular roof slope, at the top of the latter is the symbol of Aika – a spear-like stylized leaf, copies of which also crown the columns on either side of the entrance.” Unfortunately, only sketches of this bas-relief have come down to us, as the fragments of the monument found in the excavations of 1842-43 sank in the Tigris river on the way to France.

According to the testimony of A.Khachaturian, Sargon II, having captured and looted the temple of Aika-Khaldi in the summer of 714 BC, took captive many members of the royal house of Rus I, and killed his beautiful wife Rusainu at the entrance to the temple. Learning of the tragic death of his wife and the looting of the country’s main temple, King Rus I committed suicide.

In addition to that, in Mutsatsir, 6110 inhabitants of the city were captured and driven into Assyria, according to Sargon himself, and the incalculable wealth of the temples of Aika-Khaldi and his wife goddess Bagmashtu were plundered – gold statues and ornaments, silver utensils and dishes, decorative shields, precious stones, ivory crafts, etc.

So, the statue of Rus I was made of pure gold, the king was sculpted standing on his war chariot. In total, the weight of the gold, silver, copper, and bronze looted by Sargon exceeded three hundred tons (!). Now imagine the greatness of Ashtishat, where there were as many as five such temples.

But the significance of Mutsatsir and its main temple for Armenian history is far from limited to material wealth alone. Here, in the Korchayk ashkhar of Greater Armenia, was located one of the oldest centers of toponymy of our country.

The very name of the region where Mutsatsir was located speaks volumes – Aygark, that is, Aiki ark – the patrimony of Aika, the ancestor of the Armenians and their god (from the second name Khaldi subsequently derived the name of the tribe of the Chaldeans (Kahdi), who participated in the ethnogenesis of the Armenians).

It is here, on the extreme south of Korchayk and all of Greater Armenia, that the province of Nairi (Nikhorakan) is located, which gave its name to one of the most significant constituent parts of the Armenian country (there are several – Nairi, Ayasa-Azzi, Mitanni, Aratta-Ararat, Gomakan-Kommagene, Arme-Shupria).

In the Old Armenian language, the root “nar” or “nare” meant water, river, later passed into Old Persian (nikhor) and Arabic (nakhr – river). Korchayk Ashkhar is bounded on the east by the mountain range of the Vaspurakan-Zagros system – the Nairi mountains or Kuh-i-Nikhorakan. From their slopes begins and flows southwest the Nairi river, the first of the Armenian rivers to receive this name (subsequently, there will be several dozens of them).

It is a major left tributary of Ahbak-Bolshoy Zav, flowing into the main river in the north of present-day Iraqi Kurdistan, near the city of Tsovart or Dzvar (now Zibar). In ancient times, it was here that the territory of Greater Armenia ended, and the borders of its Korchayk ashkhar (the provinces of Nairi-Nikhorakan, Dasn, and Makhkert-Tun) and the country of Adiabene (northern Assyria) converged.

Now the Nairi river is called Shamdinan. One of the main and large villages of the Aygark region, which has a history of not one millennium, still retains its Old Armenian name Stuni. The name of another village, which was the administrative center of the same gavar in the 19th century, Tiar (or Diari), comes from Old Armenian Der and Assyrian-Kurdish Deir meaning the abode of monks, desert, temple. In these toponyms, the trace of the name of the ancient country of Autiara, as well as the name of the Armenian god Tir, can be seen.

Further south, in the territory of the Korchayk gavar Makhkert-Tun (Iraqi Kurdistan), on the left bank of the Great Zab, near the settlement of Harbi or Harabe (i.e. ruined, the name goes back to the Armenian Karbi) at a distance of five kilometers from each other are the caves of Shanidar and Zawi-Chemi-Shanidar (Tsav-Shanidar), where settlements of the Stone Age, one of the oldest on the planet, were discovered.

The lower, 4th cultural layer in the Shanidar cave dates back to the 40th millennium BC, and the top two layers are already Neolithic. In the excavations carried out in 1951-60 by the expedition of Columbia University (USA), bones and fragments of human skeletons were found, which are about 60 thousand years old and are attributed to the Neanderthal type. But the most interesting thing is the names of the caves.

“Shanidar” translated from Old Armenian means “built-up (populated) hill”, and Zawi-Tsav goes back to the oldest Tsob-Tsov (Tsap-Tsav, “holy”). These ancient names resonate with the above-mentioned Der-Deir. Thus, as early as the 3rd-2nd millennium BC, the local Armenians knew about the primitive camps and named them quite logically.

But if you do not know the Armenian language, and even more so do not want to recognize its obvious primacy in the territory of the Armenian Highlands and adjacent countries, then unfortunate scholars will hit a wall of complete confusion, confusion, misunderstanding of both names and geography with history in general.

by Grigor Beglaryan

Translated by Vigen Avetisyan