Urartian, Vannic, and (in older literature) Chaldean are conventional names for the language spoken by the inhabitants of the ancient kingdom of Urartu that was located in the region of Lake Van, with its capital near the site of the modern town of Van, in the Armenian Highland, modern-day Eastern Anatolia region of Turkey^[1].

First attested in the 9th century BCE, Urartian went into decline after the fall of the Urartian state in 585 BCE, and by 500 BCE it appears to have been confined to the elite, while the common people spoke (proto-)Armenian.^[2]

[edit] Classification

Urartian was an ergative-agglutinative language, which belongs to neither the Semitic nor the Indo-European families but to the Hurro-Urartian family.^[3] It survives in many inscriptions found in the area of the Urartu kingdom, written in the Assyrian cuneiform script. There have been claims^[4] of a separate autochthonous script of "Urartian hieroglyphs" but these remain unsubstantiated.

Urartian is closely related to Hurrian, though not derived from it. ^[5] Although Urartian and Hurrian are related, it is now fairly clear that the two languages developed quite independently from the third millennium onwards. ^[6]

[edit] Decipherment

F. E. Schulz, who discovered Urartu in 1827, made copies of several cuneiform inscriptions at Tušpa, but made no attempt at decipherment.

After the decipherment of Assyrian cuneiform in the 1850s, Schulz' drawings became the basis of deciphering the Urartian language. It soon became clear that it was unrelated to any known language, and attempts at decipherment based on known languages of the region failed (Georgian: F. Lenormant 1871, Armenian: A. D. Mordtmann 1872–1877). Decipherment only made progress after World War I, with the discovery of Urartian-Assyrian bilingual inscriptions at Kelišin and Topzawä ^[7][8].

In 1963, a grammar of Urartian was published by G. A. Melikishvili in Russian, appearing in German translation in 1971. In the 1970s, the genetic relation with Hurrian was established by I. M. Diakonoff.

[edit] Corpus

Urartian cuneiform tablet on display at the Erebuni Museum in Yerevan. The inscription reads: For the God Khaldi, the lord, Argishti, son of Menua, built this temple and this mighty fortress. I proclaimed it Irbuni (Erebuni) for the glory of the countries of Biai (=Urartu) and for holding the Lului (=enemy) countries in awe. By the greatness of God Khaldi, this is Argishti, son of Menua, the mighty king, the king of the countries of Biai, ruler of the city of Tushpa

The oldest delivered texts originate from the reign of Sarduri I, from the late 9th century BCE.^[9] and were produced until the fall of the realm of Urartu approximately 200 years later.

Approximately two hundred inscriptions written in the Urartian language, which adopted and modified the cuneiform script, have been discovered to date. ^[10].

[edit] Writing

[edit] Cuneiform

Urartian cuneiform is a standardized simplification of Neo-Assyrian cuneiform. Unlike in Assyrian, each sign only expresses a single sound value. The sign gi 𒄀 has the special function of expressing a hiatus, e.g. u-gi-iš-ti for Uīšdi. A variant script with non-overlapping wedges was in use for rock inscriptions.

[edit] Hieroglyphs

Urartian was also rarely written in the "Anatolian hieroglyphs" used for the Luwian language. Evidence for this is restricted to Altıntepe.

There are suggestions that besides the Luwian hieroglyphic inscriptions, Urartu also had a native hieroglyphic script. The inscription corpus is too sparse to substantiate the hypothesis. It remains unclear whether the symbols in question form a coherent writing system, or represent just a multiplicity of uncoordinated expressions of proto-writing or ad-hoc drawings.^[11] What can be identified with a certain confidence are two symbols or "hieroglyphs" found on vessels, representing certain units of measurement: for aqarqi and for ṭerusi. This is known because some vessels were labelled both in cuneiform and with these symbols.^[12]

[edit] See also

Languages portal

Ancient Near East portal

• Urartu
• Hurrians
• Hurrian language

[edit] Literature

• C. B. F. Walker: section Cuneiform in Reading the Past. Published by British Museum Press, 1996, ISBN 0-7141-8077-7.
• J. Friedrich: Urartäisch, in Handbuch der Orientalistik I, ii, 1-2, pp. 31-53. Leiden, 1969.
• Gernot Wilhelm: Urartian, in R. Woodard (ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World’s Ancient Languages. Cambridge, 2004.
• Vyacheslav V. Ivanov: "Comparative Notes on Hurro-Urartian, Northern Caucasian and Indo-European". UCLA, 1996
• Mirjo Salvini: Geschichte und Kultur der Urartäer. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt, 1995.
• Jeffrey J. Klein, Urartian Hieroglyphic Inscriptions from Altintepe, Anatolian Studies, Vol. 24, (1974), 77-94.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Russian-language scholarly publications on Urartu and the Urartian language; includes texts in Urartian