The name “Urartu” is Assyrian, linked with Assyrian cuneiform, but it isn’t of Assyrian origin, it’s a local geographical, not an ethnic, term. The toponym “Urartu” comes from the name Ararat (or Ayrarat), and to construct an entire historical epoch from this, to “create” an ancient state of Urartu in one’s imagination, is absurd.
Excerpt from the book
Ancient Armenia comprised three major territories: Greater Armenia, Lesser Armenia, and Armenian Cilicia (on the Mediterranean coast).
Sumerian sources allow us to talk about the existence of the state of Aratta in Armenia in the 5th-4th millennia BC. However, the generally accepted date for the creation of Armenia in Armenian historiography is considered to be 2107 BC.
According to Chamchyan’s “Chronological Table,” in that year the Armenian leader Haik defeated the forces of the Assyrian king Bel in battle southeast of Lake Van, established the Armenian state, and began the royal dynasty of Haykazuni with his reign.
In the 19th century, a storm erupted in the Armenian historiography of the ancient period out of the blue, and not from where it might have been expected. It all started with an unknown German teacher, G. Grotefend (1802), who, despite not being a linguistics specialist, managed to decipher ancient Persian cuneiform. Then H. Rawlinson, E. Hincks, J. Oppert, and others in the second half of the 19th – early 20th century deciphered other cuneiform systems.
This was a real revolution. Everything was mixed up in the history of the ancient East. Both literally and metaphorically, states, the lives and activities of forgotten peoples and kings, started to emerge from under the ground; the front of archaeological excavations was expanding.
It was then, in the 19th century, that cuneiform inscriptions, at first glance indistinguishable from Assyrian cuneiform, were discovered in Armenia. Reading them was not particularly difficult, as Assyrian cuneiform had already been deciphered. Armenian cuneiform began to be read as if it were Assyrian.
As a result, a new script emerged with an unclear pronunciation of words, which, as everyone admitted (and this is the most surprising!), sounded somehow distorted. But this fact did not particularly disturb anyone.
Presumably, it would have been necessary to determine how the indigenous people of Armenia altered the cuneiform script, how certain signs of the cuneiform code were pronounced, and what specific changes Assyrian cuneiform underwent when borrowed.
Questions of this nature somehow did not occur to anyone. Perhaps the ease and swiftness with which the problem was solved concealed this unsettling fact. By addressing this, further mistakes could have been avoided.
The oversight cost science dearly, leading to a concept involving an invented people and a never-existed state. The “new” language, resulting from a distorted reading of the cuneiform, was named “Urartian,” and the state itself – “Urartu” – a term only found in Assyrian cuneiform as a designation for a territory on the Armenian plateau.
Naturally, the ill-fated “Urartu” needed a territory and period of existence. To facilitate this, the ancient Armenian history of Movses Khorenatsi had to be renounced.
To make ends meet, a theory was needed, according to which the Armenian people formed and grew from a conglomerate of Urartian tribes, and Armenia arose as a result of the disintegration of Urartu in the 6th century BC.
The historical value of the first part of “History of Armenia” was dismissed as fabrication, and the information compiled in it started to be labeled legendary, shifting interest in it to the literary domain.
It should be noted that historians only began to contemplate the analysis of the very name “Urartu” when the first, but very tangible, cracks appeared in this artificially erected edifice.
Real lightning bolts, the harbingers of a storm, flashed over the unfortunate “Urartu” after the great Czech linguist and historian Bedřich Hrozný deciphered Hittite cuneiform at the beginning of the 20th century and read the rich royal archives of the Hittite capital, Hattusa.
These documents unequivocally and unambiguously narrated a state on the territory of the Armenian Highlands – Hayasa.
At first, this discovery wasn’t given much importance, but then, under the pressure of new facts, it became necessary to find a way out of a clearly absurd situation: Hayasa and “Urartu” had to be placed on the same territory in such a way that they not only “coexisted” and did not “interfere” with each other, but also so that Hayasa could turn out to be the successor of “Urartu”, and even the cause of its fall.
A real competition began (E. Forrer, A. Khachatryan, N. Adonts, Gr. Kapantsyan, and others) in the art of more successfully localizing the newly discovered state of Hayasa. Depending on the Hittite cuneiform, it was necessary to place Hayasa in High Armenia, then suddenly it was supposed to be located in the Van area, that is, right in the center of “Urartu”, then its borders were to be moved to the east.
Any localization of Hayasa met some requirements, but none of them could be considered final. The avalanche of newly deciphered Hittite documents relentlessly grew, Hayasa emerged here and there, and the chimerical edifice of “Urartu” crumbled before one’s eyes. It seemed that only one step was left to admit that “Urartu”, as well as the Urartian language and the Urartians, existed only in the imagination of the scholars who gave birth to it.
Before moving on to the terminal crisis of the “Urartu” concept, we should consider the reasons for the emergence of this concept, its success and downfall. First of all, we need to understand the historical content of the terms – Hayasa – Nairi – Urartu – Armenia, the analysis of which has never really been carried out.
The ethnic term “hai” is present in the name of the country “Hayk-Hayastan”, which is how Armenians call their country (in the Hittite term, the suffix “sa” is identical to the Armenian suffixes “k” and “stan”).
The name Hayasa is the closest to the Armenian name for Armenia and, considering that it appears in Hittite cuneiform from the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC, it follows that at least from this time one can confidently speak of the existence of the Armenian state as a specific ethnocultural phenomenon.
Hittite was located to the west of Hayasa, so it is natural that mainly the western regions of the Armenian Highlands are mentioned regarding trade relations or military campaigns – “countries”, toponymic names, etc.
Such a predominance of the western regions could lead and indeed led some researchers to erroneous ideas that Hayasa was located in the west of the Armenian Highlands in High or Little Armenia, rather than within the entire Armenian Highlands. This was a compromise solution since it did not affect the territory occupied by the state of “Urartu”.
But quite soon historical science faced facts indicating that Hayasa also covered the central and eastern regions of the Armenian Highlands. Thus, the fortified Hayasan city of Arhipsa was, according to Hittite sources, “in the sea, inside the sea”, which E. Forrer takes for Lake Van; adjacent to Arhipsa was the fortress of Dukkama, compared to the homonymous city of Duggama in northeastern Assyria, so there is little doubt that the city of Arhipsa really stood on the island of Akhtamar in Lake Van.
In 1959, I suggested that the city of Arhipsa could be located on the fortified island of Lake Sevan, since names close to “Arhipsa” (Aravis and others) are found in Syunik, in the Sotk area, i.e. southeast of Lake Sevan. The opinion of E. Forrer now seems to me more correct; but I would like to emphasize that both opinions – both E. Forrer’s and mine – equally lead to the conclusion that Hayasa was also located within the central and eastern regions of the Armenian Highlands, i.e. within the territory occupied by “Urartu”.
The name “Urartu” is Assyrian, it is associated with Assyrian cuneiform, the Assyrian world, and is not found in the so-called “Urartian” cuneiform itself. Moreover, it is not the only term for designating the part of the territory of the Armenian Highlands occupied by it among the Assyrians.
In the 13th century BC, when the Hittite state fell, Hittite information about Hayasa disappeared and accordingly the mentioned form of the country’s name. From the end of the 2nd millennium BC, the term “Nairi” appears in Assyrian sources as a common name for a vast territory lying north of Assyria, around Lakes Van and Kaputan (Urmia).
A number of researchers emphasize the closeness of the name Nairi to Semitic words denoting the concept of “river”, suggesting that “Nairi” meant “land of rivers” to the Assyrians. Indeed, the Tigris, Euphrates, Araks, Kura rivers originate on this territory.
At this time, the Assyrians apparently do not have a clear idea of the borders of the country of Nairi: this is the north “in general”, the territory in the center of which is the sea of the country of Nairi. Thus, Nairi is an Assyrian, not ethnic, not geographical, and not local name.
As they became more acquainted with this country, the Assyrians replaced the term “Nairi” with its synonym – “Urartu”, which comes from the local geographical name Ararat (or Airarat), more accurately reflecting the location of the country than the old vague Nairi – “land of rivers”.
There were all reasons for this, since the Armenian state in antiquity (for example, in the Bible) was simply called the Kingdom of Ararat. The term “Ararat” undoubtedly carries traces of Armenian toponymics and vocabulary: it is connected with the name of the God Ara (Aramazd) of the Armenian pagan pantheon and means in the form of Ararat – “the dwelling of Ara”. The Assyrian form of the name Ararat is Urartu, and the Babylonian is Urashutu.
It should be noted that in Assyrian cuneiform at the beginning of the word the cuneiform sign “u” could be read as “a”, so the same term could be written in two variants. For example, in Assyrian cuneiform, there are two variants of writing the following identical terms: “state” was denoted both as Urashutu and Arashutu; “country” – both as Urme and Arme; “city” – both as Urmeyate and Armaid, etc.
Therefore, Urartu is essentially Arartu, that is, Ararat. And of course, it’s absurd to think that the names of Mount Ararat and the central region of Armenia, Ayrarat, originated from the name Urartu used by the Assyrians two or three centuries ago. On the contrary, the Assyrian name Urartu or Arartu, like the Babylonian Urashutu or Arashutu, arose from the Armenian name Ararat, as a designation of the territory derived from the local geographical name.
Thus, the term “Urartu” (Arartu) of Assyrian cuneiform is not of Assyrian origin, it is a local geographical, but not ethnic name, which came to light following the identical term “Nairi”.
Further. As a result of an even closer acquaintance with the country, previously designated as Nairi – Urartu (Arartu), the Assyrians began to call this country as it was called by the people of this country (“Hayk”), in other words, as the Hittites designated it (“Hayasa”), that is, based on the local ethnic name, namely – “Uayaia”.
Let us remind that for the Assyrians, the initial “u” could be pronounced as “a” (or “ha”), and it becomes clear that we are dealing with the Assyrian form of the Armenian term “Hayk”, similar to the Hittite form “Hayasa”.
Moreover, by the 7th century BC, the Assyrians were already directly calling the so-called “nairo-urartian” kings the kings of “haya” (or “yaya”), that is, Armenian kings. It seems difficult to be more precise: Urartu – this is Uayaia (Hayaia), this is – Hayasa.
For a researcher who is not bound by established concepts, it is absolutely clear that the unfortunate “Urartu” is just a curiosity, the result of an error that led to further accumulation of errors.
But tradition has a huge force of inertia, it dismisses the obvious, clings to illusions, just to hold on; habituality, template thinking – this is the secret guardian of tradition.
The term Armenia (Armina) is associated not with the Assyrian, but with the Median-Persian world: from Media-Persia it moved to Greece and then to Europe. According to B.B. Piotrovsky, G.A. Melikishvili and others, this term comes from the name of the country of Arme, which was located in the southwestern part of “Urartu”.
In our opinion, the term Armina is associated with the name of the region of Aramale (Armariel), located east of Lake Van, which simply means “place of Aram”, that is, formed from the name of King Aram – the first, by the way, of the “Urartian” (read: Armenian) kings mentioned by the Assyrians. The Persians called all the extensive territory lying to the west of this eastern region of the Armenian Highlands Aramale and “Arminia”.
The ethnic homogeneity of the “country of Aramale” with the other “countries” of the highlands fully explains the expansion of this term by the Medes to the territory that the Assyrians called Nairi-Urartu (Arartu). It should be added that the Medes-Persians have long called Lake Kaputan the “Armenian Lake”, that is, Arme, or Urme (Urmia).
The fact that the Old Persian term Armina (Armenia) is identical to the Assyrian “Urartu” is evidenced by the Naqsh-e-Rostam and Behistun inscriptions of Darius: in the Babylonian text, the country is called “Urashu”, in the Persian – “Armina”. The Assyrians called it “Urartu” (“Arartu”), the Persians – “Armenia”, the Hittites – “Hayasa”.
However, in order for “Urartu” to disappear, one more obstacle had to be overcome, namely the “Urartian” language with a completely incredible vocabulary, phonetics, and grammatical structure. Linguists were at a loss as to which language group to assign this language to, but nevertheless, they successfully read more and more inscriptions.
Is it conceivable to imagine that Armenians in Armenia once spoke and wrote in a non-Armenian language? It was easier to reject all the historical prerequisites that identified Urartu with Armenia, and to agree with the concept of Urartu as a non-Armenian state.
Therefore, it was necessary to try to restore the true, uncorrupted meaning of cuneiform signs, that is, to find out how the Armenians changed the Assyrian cuneiform code, adapting it to the sound of the Armenian speech.
A key was needed to read the “Urartian” cuneiform in Armenian, and such that the content of the text was preserved (the correctness of the text can always be checked by bilinguals – bilingual inscriptions), but the lexical composition would become Armenian.
Naturally, there could be no arbitrariness here: if the “Urartian” lexicon and phonetics were artificially “adapted” to the Armenian, this would lead to an arbitrary change in the content of the texts, and conversely, if the content of at least one text was artificially changed or “pulled” to the texts of bilinguals, then this would make reading of words impossible.
The correct decryption and reading of cuneiforms should be based on a reliable criterion, and such a criterion was the principle of phonetic correspondences. Taking it as a basis, I was able in the autumn of 1959 to find the true pronunciation of about a hundred cuneiform signs, and then, giving these signs the found meanings, to decipher about 550 words, names and geographical names, having well-known Armenian roots.
And so the cuneiform was read anew, while completely freely preserving the previous semantic values: instead of “Biaina” it was read as “Van”, instead of “Teishebaini” – “Tsovan”, instead of “Artsibini” – “Artsvin”, instead of “arshe” (“boy”) – “ars” (“man”), instead of “bura” (“slave”) – “var” (“low”), instead of “kiri” (“cup”) – “ker” (“cup”), instead of “laubi” (“official”) – “lav” (“nobleman”), instead of “pulusi” (“stone inscription”) – “palas” (“speaking stone”), instead of “kiura” (“land”) – “kora” (“land”), etc.
The true pronunciation of cuneiform texts was restored based on the found phonetic correspondences, and the root structure of the “Urartian” language turned out to be identical to the Armenian, from which it follows that there was no special “Urartian” language.
Later, in a series of publications, G.B. Djaukyan showed that many words of Indo-European origin are present in the cuneiform texts. A significant blow to the concept of “Urartu” was struck by the linguist-Hittitologist Valery Khachatryan, who in 1966-1968, based on a huge amount of factual material from Hittite sources, showed that in the middle of the II millennium BC, Hayasa occupied the entire territory defined by the Assyrians as the country of Nairi-Urartu. V. Khachatryan constructed a map of the state of Hayasa, where almost all the main elements present on the famous map of Armenia by Anania Shirakatsi (7th century) are present, finally proving the unreality of the concept of the state of Nairi-Urartu.
Finally, the Hayasa archaeological object Metsamor, discovered by me in 1963, with a developed mining and metallurgical production and a hieroglyphic writing system, left no doubt about the localization of Hayasa within the limits of the Ararat region of Armenia.
The fact that Metsamor is precisely Hayasa (that is, ancient Armenian), and not a monument of any other culture, is evidenced, among other proofs, by the first hieroglyphic writings discovered here in Armenia.
The inscriptions of Darius testify that Urartu is Armenia, and all four terms: Hayasa – Nairi – Urartu – Armenia – are completely equivalent.
In Hittite texts, the term Hayasa denotes a state in the Armenian highlands; when Hittite texts disappear, this term also disappears. The terms Nairi – Urartu – Uayais (Hayais) in Assyrian inscriptions denote states on the same territory, which the Hittites called Hayasa.
With the disappearance of Assyrian texts, these terms also disappear. The Persian term Armina appears, completely equivalent to all the above. The Greeks turn “Armina” into “Armenia”, and this term spread all over Europe…
By Suren Ayvazyan
Translated by Vigen Avetisyan
