ARMENIAN HERITAGE SITES IN TURKEY AND IRAN

VAN–ANCIENTKINGDOM
OFURARTU
Urartu is a geographical region commonly used as
theexonymfortheIronAgekingdomalsoknownby
the modern rendition of its endonym, the Kingdom
of Van, centered around Lake Van in the historic
Armenian Highlands (present-day eastern
Anatolia).Thekingdomrosetopowerinthemid-9 th
century BC, but went into gradual decline and was
eventually conquered by the Iranian Medes in the
early 6 th century BC. The geopolitical region would
re-emerge as Armenia shortly after. The peoples of
Urartu are the earliest identifiable ancestors of the
Armenians. Urartu at its zenith had a profound
culturalinfluenceonitsneighborsreachingasfaras
AsiaandEurope.
ThenameUrartu(Armenian: Ուրարտու;Assyrian:
טָרָרֲא Hebrew: māt Urarṭu; Babylonian: Urashtu;
Ararat) comes from Assyrian sources. Urartu is
cognatewiththeBiblicalArarat,AkkadianUrashtu,
and Armenian Ayrarat. The name Kingdom of Van
(Urartian:Biai,Biainili; Վանի թագավորություն)
isderivedfromtheUrartiantoponymBiainili,which
was probably pronounced as Vanele, and called Van
(Վան) in Old Armenian, hence the names
"KingdomofVan"or"VannicKingdom".
TheKingdomofVanwasdestroyedin590BCandby
the late 6 th century, the Satrapy of Armenia had
replaced it. Little is known of what happened to the
region between the fall of the Kingdom of Van and
the appearance of the Satrapy of Armenia.
According to historian Touraj Daryaee, during the
Armenian rebellion against the Persian king Darius
I in 521 BC, some of the personal and topographic
names attested in connection with Armenia or
Armenians were of Urartian origin, suggesting that
UrartianelementspersistedwithinArmeniaafterits
fall.IntheBehistunInscription(c.522BC),aswellas
theXVInscription(c.486–465BC),refertoArmenia
and Armenians as synonyms of Urartu and
Urartians. The toponym Urartu did not disappear,
however, as the name of the province of Ayrarat in
the center of the Kingdom of Armenia is believed to
beitscontinuum.
AccordingtoHerodotus,theAlarodians(Alarodioi),
presumably a variation of the name Urartian/
Araratian, were part of the 18 th Satrapy of the
AchaemenidEmpireandformedaspecialcontingent
in the grand army of Xerxes I. According to this
theory, the Urartians of the 18 th Satrapy were
subsequentlyabsorbedintotheArmeniannation.
In a study published in 2017, the complete
mitochondrial genomes of 4 ancient skeletons from
Urartu were analyzed alongside other ancient
populations found in modern-day Armenia and
Artsakh spanning 7,800 years. The study shows that
modern-dayArmeniansarethepeoplewhohavethe
leastgeneticdistancefromthoseancientskeletons.
The written language that the kingdom's political
elite used is retroactively referred to as Urartian,
which is attested in numerous cuneiform
inscriptions throughout Armenia and eastern
Turkey. It is unknown what language was spoken by
the peoples of Urartu at the time of the existence of
the Kingdom of Van, but there is evidence of
linguistic contact between the proto-Armenian
language and the Urartian language at an early date
(sometime between the 3rd—2nd millennium BC),
occurringpriortotheformationofthekingdom.