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 that takes its name from the fortress. The hill rises on its own out of the flat ground where the Ararat plain meets the built-up city, so the citadel looks out over farmland, suburb and the mountains beyond it in one turn of the head.

The position was chosen for what it controls rather than for what it is. From the top, the plain and the routes crossing it are visible for a long way, and the slopes are steep enough on three sides to do much of the defensive work by themselves. This is the standard Urartian choice of ground, and the same reasoning put fortresses on comparable outcrops across the same plain.

One distinction is worth making before arriving. 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 of it. They are two parts of one visit and two different things, and a photograph captioned Erebuni may show either.

Argishti I and the foundation inscription

The fortress belongs to one reign. Argishti I, son of Menua, ruled Urartu in the first half of the eighth century BC and was the king under whom Urartian power reached furthest north, across the Ararat plain. Erebuni is the surviving physical record of that reach.

The record is literal. A basalt block carrying a cuneiform text in the Urartian language states that Argishti, son of Menua, built this fortress by the greatness of the god Khaldi, that 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. Wordings differ slightly between translations, and the standard published edition of the Urartian royal inscriptions is Mirjo Salvini's corpus, which is where the text is cited from rather than from a display label.

What the inscription does not carry is a year. The date 782 BC comes from placing this foundation within Argishti's reign, using his own annals and the synchronisms with Assyrian records that Urartian chronology depends on — a reconstruction accepted across the scholarship and used by the museum-reserve, not a figure read off the stone. Saying that plainly costs nothing and prevents the commonest 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 the citadels raised on the Ararat plain in those reigns are what that expansion consisted of. A garrison, a store of grain and a temple were placed on a hill, and the plain around them was administered from it.

The deportation clause in the foundation text belongs to the same logic. A new fortress needed a population, and the population was moved in rather than recruited locally — which tells a reader something exact about how the Urartian state worked, and something it stated about itself without embarrassment.

Erebuni was one of a group. Argishtikhinili was founded further west on the same plain within a few years, and in the following century the main Urartian centre of the region was Teishebaini at Karmir Blur, a few kilometres from here. Reading Erebuni as the single Urartian site of the Ararat plain gets the pattern wrong: it was a node in a system of them, and the system is the point.

Palace, temple and storeroom

The citadel follows the shape of the hilltop inside a defensive wall of stone footings carrying mudbrick above, with buttresses at intervals and a single principal approach. Everything else sits within that outline, which is why the plan reads so clearly from the air and so poorly from the ground.

Three functions share the enclosure. The royal apartments and a courtyard with a colonnade make up the palace; a temple of Khaldi, the chief god of the Urartian state, stood beside a hall whose walls carried painted decoration in red, blue and white; and a second, tower-like temple of the type Urartian texts call a susi was dedicated to another god. Fragments of the wall paintings were lifted during excavation and conserved, so the colour a visitor sees in place is reconstruction rather than survival.

The fourth function is the least glamorous and the most informative. Long ranges of storerooms held sunken jars for grain, wine and oil, and their capacity is far beyond what the people living on the hill could consume. Storage on that scale is a statement about the state rather than the garrison: the harvest of the plain was gathered here, held here and redistributed from here.

So the fortress was administrative, military and religious at once, and the three were not separable. That combination is the ordinary Urartian pattern rather than a peculiarity of this site, and it is the most useful thing to carry up the hill.

What excavation found

The hill was known to be 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, when the foundation inscription came to light and the identification became certain, under the archaeologist Konstantine Hovhannisyan; campaigns have continued since, including a joint Franco-Armenian project in recent years whose published work has revised parts of the earlier chronology.

What the digging produced falls into two kinds. There is architecture — walls, floors, doorways, the plan of the whole citadel — surviving mostly at foundation level, and there are portable finds: pottery, bronze objects, weapons and helmets, seal impressions, further inscriptions, and the fragments of wall painting. Material from later periods was found on the same hill, which is how the site's afterlife is known at all.

The line between record and interpretation runs through the naming. That one range of rooms is a palace and another a temple is an archaeological argument built from plan, contents and comparison with better-preserved Urartian citadels, not something the Urartians labelled for us. The foundation inscription is a record; the room names are a reading. Both are good work, and they are not the same kind of statement.

After the kingdom

The Urartian state came to an end in the early sixth century BC, and Erebuni's own importance had already declined before that: in the seventh century the administrative weight of the plain lay with Teishebaini at Karmir Blur. Exactly why is argued over, and the honest position is that the evidence supports a shift of centre better than it supports 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 of that date was raised over earlier Urartian work — one of the reasons the site matters to specialists well beyond Urartian studies. Later still the settlement of the district moved off the hill, and Erebuni became what it is now: a mound with a plan under it.

That is the point at which the popular version of the story usually overreaches. The continuity between Erebuni and Yerevan is a continuity of place and name across a landscape, not 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 derivation of Yerevan from it is the standard explanation, accepted in Armenian scholarship and resting on a plausible chain of sound change and on the survival of the name in this region; it is a linguistic reconstruction rather than a documented succession of spellings, and scholars have disagreed about what the Urartian word itself meant. A reader is on safe ground with "the name of the city is generally derived from Erebuni" and on thinner ground with anything more definite than that.

The modern use of the site is easier to state exactly. Yerevan celebrated its 2750th anniversary in 1968, counting from 782 BC, and the museum-reserve at the foot of the hill was opened for that anniversary; the name Erebuni now belongs to a city district, a museum and an annual civic festival. The city's official age is a decision to count from an inscription — and the inscription, unlike many things a capital's founding myth is built on, is a real object that can be looked at.

Both halves of that are worth keeping. The document is genuine and the date is a scholarly reconstruction; the symbolism is modern and the object it rests on is ancient. Neither statement 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: the interest is in the plan, the setting and the view, and a visitor expecting walls to walk between will be looking at a metre of stone and a good deal of restoration. Where the reconstruction begins is not always signposted.

The second is that the objects are elsewhere on 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, and seeing the citadel without it gives half the visit.

The third is the habit this article has been practising throughout: four different kinds of claim are made 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 are defensible; only the first is written down by the people who were there.