Urartu: the Kingdom of Van

Urartu, Biainili, Van, Ararat: four names for one state

This state appears in scholarly and school literature under several different names, and that usually causes confusion. The names all refer to one state; what differs is who did the naming, and when. The form Urartu is Assyrian: it is what the scribes of the neighbouring empire called the country they fought for two centuries, and because the Assyrian annals are among the earliest written references to this region, that is the form that passed into European scholarship.

The Urartian kings themselves called their country Biainili in their own inscriptions, the land around Lake Van. It is this word that connects, through a long chain of linguistic change, to the place name Van, and it is from this genuine self-designation that the form Kingdom of Van used in Armenian historiography derives — the form under which the state is usually presented in Armenian-language educational writing. Assyrian sources also used the name Nairi for the lands of the same region, and the Urartian kings adopted it into their titles: the inscription of Sarduri I calls him king of the land of Nairi.

The fourth name comes from the Bible. The Ararat of the Hebrew text is accepted in scholarship as a rendering of the same name Urartu in the Hebrew consonantal script, and it is from this form that the name Ararat kingdom arises, used in Armenian alongside Kingdom of Van. It is worth noting that this is the name of a state and not the name of Mount Ararat: the connection between the two is one of naming, and Urartian inscriptions do not call that mountain by this name.

One thing these names do not tell us is the linguistic affiliation of the Urartians. Urartian is related to Hurrian and does not belong to the Indo-European family, so it is not an ancestor of Armenian. The use of the forms Kingdom of Van and Ararat kingdom in Armenian historiography rests on geography and on later historical continuity rather than on linguistic descent, and confusing the two is the commonest error on this subject.

The land and its people

The heartland of Urartu lay on the volcanic plateau surrounding Lake Van, in what is today eastern Turkey, and at its widest reach the kingdom controlled territory stretching toward Lake Sevan and Lake Urmia. This is high, difficult country, cut by mountain ridges and fed by short, fast rivers. Winters are long and snow closes the passes for months, while the summer sun bakes the valley floors. Any state that wanted to survive here had to master two things at once: the storage of water and the defence of narrow mountain routes.

The Urartians spoke a language related to Hurrian and unrelated to the Indo-European family, and they wrote it using a cuneiform script borrowed from Assyria. Hundreds of their royal inscriptions survive on cliff faces, temple walls and stone blocks, describing building projects, campaigns and offerings to the gods. Because these inscriptions are formulaic, historians read them carefully and compare them with Assyrian annals written by Urartu's rivals, which describe the same events from the opposite direction.

The population of the kingdom was probably mixed from the beginning. Urartian rulers governed a patchwork of valleys with their own local chiefs, languages and traditions, and the royal texts often list conquered districts by name. Most scholars now think that speakers of early Armenian lived within or beside this world, and that the collapse of the Urartian state helped an Armenian-speaking population become dominant across the same highlands.

Kings, fortresses and expansion

The traditional founder of the unified kingdom is Aramu, mentioned in Assyrian records around 860 BC. His successor Sarduri I established the capital at Tushpa on the rock of Van, where his inscription proudly names him king of the universe and king of the land of Nairi. Later rulers, above all Menua, Argishti I and Sarduri II, pushed Urartian control north into the Ararat plain and east toward the Caspian slope, turning a defensive federation into an empire that could challenge Assyria for control of the trade routes of the region.

Urartian power rested on fortresses. Royal engineers chose steep outcrops, cut terraces into the rock, and raised massive stone foundations topped by mudbrick walls. Inside these citadels stood temples, barracks and enormous storerooms lined with jars for grain, wine and oil. Erebuni, founded by Argishti I in 782 BC above the modern city of Yerevan, and Teishebaini at Karmir Blur are among the best excavated examples, and their storage capacity shows how carefully the state gathered and redistributed the harvest.

Warfare and diplomacy alternated across two centuries. Urartu suffered a serious defeat when the Assyrian king Sargon II campaigned in the region in 714 BC, sacking the sanctuary of Musasir and carrying off its treasures. Yet the kingdom recovered and continued to build, raising fortresses even in the last decades of its existence.

• Aramu, first Urartian king named in Assyrian sources, around 860 BC
• Sarduri I, founder of the capital Tushpa on the rock of Van
• Menua, builder of the great canal that still carries water near Van
• Argishti I, founder of Erebuni in 782 BC
• Rusa II, builder of Teishebaini and other late fortresses

Water, farming and metalwork

The achievement that most impresses modern engineers is Urartian hydraulics. The canal built under King Menua runs for more than fifty kilometres, carrying fresh water from mountain springs to the fields around Van, and parts of it still function today. Urartian builders also created reservoirs by damming mountain valleys, and several of these artificial lakes remain in use. These works transformed a dry plateau into land that could support cities, and they required both surveying skill and the ability to organise large numbers of workers.

With irrigation came orchards and vineyards. Storerooms at excavated fortresses have yielded rows of huge clay jars marked with capacity signs, along with carbonised grain, grape seeds and traces of wine and sesame oil. Cattle, sheep and horses were central to the economy, and Urartian horses were valued across the Near East. The state kept careful accounts, and the standardised jar marks are early evidence of a bureaucratic system that measured and taxed agricultural surplus.

Urartian metalworkers were equally admired. Bronze cauldrons with bull-headed handles, decorated helmets, shields, quivers and delicate belt plaques have been found from the Armenian Highlands to Greek and Etruscan sites, showing that Urartian workshops supplied a wide export market. Many of these objects carry royal inscriptions, which means that even luxury goods served to advertise the authority of the king.

Gods and sacred places

The Urartian pantheon is known chiefly from a long inscription carved into the rock niches at Meher Dur near Van, which lists dozens of deities and the exact offerings due to each. At the head of the list stands Haldi, the supreme god of war and kingship, followed by Teisheba, a storm god, and Shivini, a sun god. Kings described their victories as the achievements of Haldi, and campaigns were often launched from his sanctuaries.

Urartian temples were compact square towers with thick walls, set within fortress courtyards. Around them archaeologists have found altars, sacrificial deposits and stelae recording gifts of livestock. The sanctuary of Musasir, shown in an Assyrian relief with a columned porch and a triangular gable, was the most famous of these shrines, and its loss to Sargon II in 714 BC was treated as a national catastrophe.

Burial customs varied. Rock-cut chambers held the remains of the elite together with jewellery, weapons and vessels, while cremation urns have been found in cemeteries near several fortresses. Together with the temple inscriptions, these graves suggest a religion focused on the protection of the community by powerful divine patrons rather than on elaborate ideas of personal afterlife.

The fall of the kingdom

Urartu ceased to exist in the early sixth century BC, and this is the worst-documented part of the kingdom's history. No Urartian inscription describes the end of the state: the royal texts break off, and the next written evidence in which this territory appears is already Persian and calls the region Armina. Everything about the fall is therefore reconstructed indirectly, from archaeology and from the history of the neighbours.

The difficulty is compounded by the loss, in the same period, of the source that observed Urartu from outside. Assyria — Urartu's chief rival and the author of the richest external testimony about it — itself collapsed in 612 BC. At precisely the moment Urartu was approaching its end, the steady flow of records about it stops as well. This is why the exact date and the circumstances of the fall remain an open question.

What is usually named as a combination of pressures includes Median expansion from the east and incursions by nomadic peoples from the north. Archaeology confirms that the end was violent in at least some centres: excavations at the fortress of Teishebaini at Karmir Blur have exposed a destruction layer with traces of fire, and this fortress was one of the largest building projects of the late period. At the same time it should be remembered that the destruction of one fortress is not an explanation for the fall of an entire state.

There is also a second, non-military explanation that receives more attention today. Urartian power rested on fortresses, storerooms and a strictly centralised system of redistribution. A structure of that kind is strong for as long as the centre functions, and quickly becomes useless once the centre stops gathering and distributing the harvest. The available evidence therefore gives no final answer to the question of conquest or collapse, and the most cautious formulation is that external pressure and the vulnerability of the internal system worked together.

What is not in dispute is that the state disappeared and that what it had built did not. In the following centuries the Armenian Highlands passed under Median and then Achaemenid rule, and a united Armenian kingdom would reach its greatest extent very much later, under Tigran the Great.

From Urartu to Armenia

The Urartian state disappeared in the early sixth century BC, but the landscape it built did not. Canals kept flowing, fortress mounds remained visible, and the settlements founded by Urartian kings often continued as villages and towns. Erebuni gave its name, through a long chain of sound changes, to Yerevan, and the city officially dates its foundation to Argishti's inscription of 782 BC, which makes it older than Rome.

Ancient Armenian tradition preserved a memory of this era in legendary form. The story of Ara the Handsome and the Assyrian queen Shamiram, retold by the historian Movses Khorenatsi, places a great builder queen at Van and credits her with the canal and the cliff inscriptions. Modern scholarship attributes those works to Menua, but the legend shows that the monuments never stopped being explained and reinterpreted.

For historians today, Urartu matters because it provides the first detailed written and archaeological picture of organised life in the Armenian Highlands. Studying it teaches a valuable lesson about evidence: royal inscriptions, enemy chronicles, excavated storerooms and later legends each tell part of the story, and only by reading them together can we reconstruct what actually happened.