Urartian language
| Urartian | |
|---|---|
| Vannic | |
| Native to | Armenian Highlands |
| Region | Urartu |
| Era | attested 9th–6th century BCE |
Hurro-Urartian
| |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | xur |
xur | |
| Glottolog | urar1245 |
The Urartian or Vannic language was spoken by the inhabitants of the ancient kingdom of Urartu, located in the region of Lake Van, with its capital near the site of the modern town of Van, in the modern-day Armenian Highlands area of Turkey.[1] Its prevalence is unknown. While some believe it was probably dominant around Lake Van and in the areas along the upper Zab valley,[2] others, however, believe it was spoken by a relatively small population who comprised a ruling class.[3]
First attested in the 9th century BCE, Urartian ceased to be written after the fall of the Urartian state in 585 BCE, and presumably it became extinct due to the fall of Urartu.[4] It must have had long contact with, and been gradually totally replaced, by an early form of Armenian,[5][6][7] although it is only in the fifth century CE that the first written examples of Armenian appear.[8]
Classification[]
Urartian was an ergative, agglutinative language, which belongs to the Hurro-Urartian family, whose only other known member is Hurrian.[9] It survives in many inscriptions found in the area of the Urartu kingdom, written in the Assyrian cuneiform script. There have been claims[10] of a separate autochthonous script of "Urartian hieroglyphs" but they remain unsubstantiated.
Urartian is closely related to Hurrian, a somewhat better documented language attested for an earlier, non-overlapping period, approximately from 2000 BCE to 1200 BCE (written by native speakers until about 1350 BCE). The two languages must have developed quite independently from approximately 2000 BCE onwards.[11][12] Although Urartian is not a direct continuation of any of the attested dialects of Hurrian,[13] many of its features are best explained as innovative developments with respect to Hurrian as it is known from the preceding millennium. The closeness holds especially true of the so-called Old Hurrian dialect, known above all from Hurro-Hittite bilingual texts.
The external connections of the Hurro-Urartian languages are disputed. There exist various proposals for a genetic relationship to other language families (e.g. Northeast Caucasian languages, Indo European languages, or Kartvelian languages), but none of these are generally accepted.[14]
Indo-European (namely Armenian and Anatolian, as well as Iranian and possibly Paleo-Balkan) etymologies have been proposed for many Urartian personal and topographic names, such as the names of kings Arame and Argishti, regions such as Diauehi and Uelikulqi, cities such as Arzashkun, geographical features like the Arșania River, as well as some Urartian vocabulary and grammar.[15][16][17]
Decipherment[]
The German scholar Friedrich Eduard Schulz, who discovered the Urartian inscriptions of the Lake Van region in 1826, made copies of several cuneiform inscriptions at Tushpa, but made no attempt at decipherment.[18]
Schulz's drawings, published posthumously only in 1840 in the Journal Asiatique,[19] were crucial in forwarding the decipherment of Mesopotamian cuneiform by Edward Hincks.[20]
After the decipherment of Assyrian cuneiform in the 1850s, Schulz's 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.[21] The script was finally deciphered in 1882 by A. H. Sayce. The oldest of these inscriptions is from the time of Sarduri I of Urartu, whose title was 'King of the Four Quarters'.[18]
Decipherment only made progress after World War I, with the discovery of Urartian-Assyrian bilingual inscriptions at Kelišin and .[21][22]
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.
Corpus[]
The oldest recorded texts originate from the reign of Sarduri I, from the late 9th century BCE.[23] Texts 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.[24]
Writing[]
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