Erebuni Fortress

Where Erebuni Fortress is

Erebuni stands on Arin Berd, a low hill at the south-eastern edge of Yerevan, in the city district named after the fortress. The hill rises on its own from the flat ground where the Ararat plain meets the city. From the citadel you can take in farmland, suburbs and the mountains beyond with one turn of the head.

The spot was chosen for the ground it commands. From the top you can see far across the plain and the routes that cross it, and on three sides the slopes are steep enough to do much of the defending on their own. This was the usual Urartian choice of site, and the same thinking put fortresses on similar outcrops across the plain.

One point is worth sorting out before you arrive. The Erebuni Historical and Archaeological Museum-Reserve stands at the foot of the hill and holds the inscription and the finds. The fortress is the excavated citadel on top. They are two parts of one visit but two different things, and a photograph captioned Erebuni may show either.

Argishti I and the foundation inscription

The fortress belongs to a single reign. Argishti I, son of Menua, ruled Urartu in the first half of the eighth century BC, and under him Urartian power reached furthest north, across the Ararat plain. Erebuni is what survives on the ground of that northward push.

The inscription spells this out. A basalt block carries a cuneiform text in the Urartian language. It states that Argishti, son of Menua, built this fortress by the greatness of the god Khaldi. It says he proclaimed it Erebuni for the might of the land of Biainili and to hold the lands of the enemy in awe, and that the ground had been waste before he built on it. The same foundation texts record that the king settled six thousand six hundred warriors here, brought from two conquered lands. Translations differ slightly in wording. The standard published edition of the Urartian royal inscriptions is Mirjo Salvini's corpus, and that is where the text should be quoted from, not from a display label.

What the inscription does not give is a year. The date 782 BC comes from placing the foundation within Argishti's reign, using his own annals and the links with Assyrian records on which Urartian chronology depends. Scholars broadly accept this reconstruction and the museum-reserve uses it, but it is not a figure you can read off the stone. Knowing this heads off the most common misreading of the site.

Erebuni and the kingdom of Urartu

Erebuni did not grow into a fortress; it was founded as one. The kingdom of Urartu, centred on Tushpa by Lake Van, pushed north under Menua and then Argishti I, and that expansion took the form of citadels built on the Ararat plain. A garrison, a grain store and a temple were placed on a hill, and the surrounding plain was governed from there.

The clause about bringing in settlers fits the same pattern. A new fortress needed a population, and that population was moved in, not recruited locally. This tells us something precise about how the Urartian state worked, and it is something the state recorded about itself without embarrassment.

Erebuni was one of several such sites. Argishtikhinili was founded further west on the same plain within a few years, and in the following century the main Urartian centre in the region was Teishebaini at Karmir Blur, a few kilometres from here. It is a mistake to see Erebuni as the only Urartian site on the Ararat plain. It was one point in a network, and the network is what matters.

Palace, temple and storeroom

The citadel follows the shape of the hilltop. Its defensive wall had stone footings with mudbrick above, buttresses at intervals and one main approach. Everything else sits inside that outline, which is why the plan is so clear from the air and so hard to make out on the ground.

Three functions shared the enclosure. The royal apartments and a courtyard with a colonnade made up the palace. A temple of Khaldi, the chief god of the Urartian state, stood beside a hall whose walls were painted in red, blue and white. A second, tower-like temple, of the type Urartian texts call a susi, was dedicated to another god. Fragments of the wall paintings were removed during excavation and conserved, so the colour a visitor sees on the walls today is a reconstruction, not the original.

The fourth function is the least glamorous and tells us the most. Long rows of storerooms held sunken jars for grain, wine and oil, far more than the people living on the hill could ever use. Storage on that scale says something about the state, not the garrison: the harvest of the plain was collected here, kept here and handed out again from here.

So the fortress was an administrative, military and religious centre all at once, and these roles could not be pulled apart. This mix was the normal Urartian pattern, not something peculiar to Erebuni, and it is the most useful idea to take with you up the hill.

What excavation found

People knew the hill was ancient long before anyone worked out what it was, and a small dig took place in the late nineteenth century. Systematic excavation began in 1950 under the archaeologist Konstantine Hovhannisyan, when the foundation inscription came to light and the identification became certain. Work has continued since, including a recent joint Franco-Armenian project whose published results have revised parts of the earlier chronology.

The digging produced two kinds of material. One is architecture: walls, floors, doorways and the plan of the whole citadel, mostly surviving at foundation level. The other is portable finds: pottery, bronze objects, weapons and helmets, seal impressions, further inscriptions, and the fragments of wall painting. Material from later periods also turned up on the hill, and that is the only reason the site's later history is known at all.

The line between record and interpretation runs through the names of the rooms. Calling one group of rooms a palace and another a temple is an archaeological argument, based on the plan, the contents and comparison with better-preserved Urartian citadels. The Urartians did not label them for us. The foundation inscription is a record; the room names are an interpretation. Both are sound work, but they are different kinds of statement.

After the kingdom

The Urartian state came to an end in the early sixth century BC, and Erebuni had already lost importance before then. In the seventh century the administrative weight of the plain lay with Teishebaini at Karmir Blur. Why this happened is debated. The evidence points more clearly to a shift of centre than to any single dramatic cause.

The hill was not abandoned when the kingdom fell. Building continued on the citadel in the Achaemenid period, when this region was a satrapy of the Persian empire, and a columned hall from that time was raised over earlier Urartian work. This is one reason the site matters to specialists well beyond Urartian studies. Later still, the district's settlement moved off the hill, and Erebuni became what it is now: a mound with a plan beneath it.

This is where popular versions of the story often go too far. Erebuni and Yerevan are linked by place and by name across a landscape, not by an unbroken town on this hilltop. Nobody has lived on Arin Berd for a very long time.

Erebuni, Yerevan and a birthday

The name written on the stone is Erebuni. The standard explanation, accepted in Armenian scholarship, is that the name Yerevan comes from it, through a plausible chain of sound changes and the survival of the name in this region. But this is a linguistic reconstruction, not a recorded series of spellings, and scholars have disagreed about what the Urartian word itself meant. It is safe to say that "the name of the city is generally derived from Erebuni"; anything more definite stands on thinner ground.

The modern use of the site is easier to pin down. Yerevan celebrated its 2750th anniversary in 1968, counting from 782 BC, and the museum-reserve at the foot of the hill opened for that anniversary. The name Erebuni now belongs to a city district, a museum and an annual city festival. The city's official age is a decision to count from an inscription. Unlike much of what capitals build their founding myths on, that inscription is a real object you can go and look at.

Both halves of this are worth keeping in mind. The document is genuine, and the date is a scholarly reconstruction. The symbolism is modern, and the object behind it is ancient. Neither fact weakens the other.

What to understand before seeing it

The first thing is what survives. This is a site at foundation level, not a standing fortress, and its interest lies in the plan, the setting and the view. A visitor expecting walls to walk between will find about a metre of stone and a good deal of restoration, and it is not always marked where the reconstruction begins.

The second is that the objects are in another part of the same site. The foundation inscription, the painted fragments, the pottery and the bronze are in the museum-reserve at the foot of the hill. Seeing the citadel without the museum is only half the visit.

The third is the habit this article has tried to practise throughout. People make four different kinds of claim about Erebuni, and they are not equally firm. The inscription records a builder, a name and a purpose. Archaeology reconstructs a palace, temples and a storage economy. Linguistics derives Yerevan from Erebuni. A modern city keeps a birthday. All four can be defended, but only the first was written down by the people who were there.