According to texts from the Louvre, the great army of Sargon crossed the Kurdish mountains en route to Lake Urmia, swept through the local cities of Ararat, and then went into the land of Nairi south of Lake Van.
Knowing that his Assyrian predecessors hadn’t managed to seize the city of Tushpa (also known as Van), Sargon bypassed it and stealthily marched across the northern and western areas of the lake towards the city of Musasir.
His unexpected attack on Musasir confused the whole neighborhood and had the locals panicking. King Urzana along with his suite fled into the mountains, leaving their palace filled with immeasurable treasures for the Assyrians to obtain. Having overrun the city, Sargon entered the temple of god Khaldi, one of the three chief deities of the Kingdom of Van (Urartu). There, he found even greater valuables.
The list of the treasures catalogued in the Louvre text is beyond any imagination and comprehension. King Hrusha (Rusa) of Urartu had focused the majority of the wealth of his kingdom in Musasir for safekeeping.
The king himself chose Urzana to safeguard the treasures from the Assyrian king. The treasures of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun found in the 1920s seem oh so insignificant in comparison with the immense treasures that Sargon brought back to Assyria.
Broken remnants of the cuneiform disk recording the solar precession cycle through the houses. The meticulous and painstaking observation of celestial heavens and subsequent recording would ensure foretelling the future based on cosmic phenomena. The supreme obsession among other things was primarily borne out of the terrible anxiety of calculating the shift of the axis Celestial and terrestrial shift [polar opposites reverse + becomes – and vice versa] would always result in a catastrophe or a “deluge” of civilization. Nine being the sacred Chaldean number of mother earth and all the planets except Venus which has the fadic value of four.
Luckily, Sargon has recorded his enormous loot in text and bas-reliefs in Assur and his palace in Dur-Sharrukin for us to investigate the great values he had brought from the Urartian city. Apart from everything else, Sargon’s inscriptions allow for an insight into the high culture of Urartu, which would be otherwise lost in the unwritten pages of history. Some say that having learned about the seizure and plunder of Musasir and the sacrilege of the Great Temple of Khaldi, sorrowful King Rusa committed suicide.
Source: www.armenianhighland.com
