Urartu: the Kingdom of Van

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

This state goes by several names in scholarly books and school textbooks, and that often confuses readers. All the names refer to the same state. What differs is who used each name, and when. Urartu is the Assyrian form. It is what the scribes of the neighbouring empire called the country they fought for two centuries. The Assyrian annals are among the earliest written references to this region, so this is the form that passed into European scholarship.

In their own inscriptions, the Urartian kings called their country Biainili, the land around Lake Van. Through a long chain of language change, this word is linked to the place name Van. The form Kingdom of Van, used in Armenian historiography, comes from this name the Urartians really gave their own country, and it is the name Armenian-language textbooks usually use for the state. Assyrian sources also used the name Nairi for lands in the same region, and the Urartian kings took it into their titles: the inscription of Sarduri I calls him king of the land of Nairi.

The fourth name comes from the Bible. Scholars accept that the Ararat of the Hebrew text is the same name, Urartu, written in the Hebrew consonantal script. This form gave rise to the name Ararat kingdom, which Armenian uses alongside Kingdom of Van. This is the name of a state, not of Mount Ararat. The two share only a name, and Urartian inscriptions do not call that mountain by this name.

What these names do not tell us is which language family the Urartians belonged to. Urartian is related to Hurrian and is not an Indo-European language, so it is not an ancestor of Armenian. Armenian historians use the names Kingdom of Van and Ararat kingdom because of geography and later historical continuity, not because one language descends from the other. Mixing up the two is the commonest mistake on this subject.

The land and its people

The heartland of Urartu lay on the volcanic plateau around Lake Van, in what is today eastern Turkey. At its widest, the kingdom controlled land 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: storing water and defending narrow mountain routes.

The Urartians spoke a language related to Hurrian and unrelated to the Indo-European family, and they wrote it in 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. These inscriptions follow set formulas, so historians read them with care. They compare them with the Assyrian annals written by Urartu's rivals, which describe the same events from the other side.

The kingdom's population was probably mixed from the start. Urartian rulers governed a patchwork of valleys, each with its 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 inside or next to 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

Tradition names Aramu, mentioned in Assyrian records around 860 BC, as the founder of the unified kingdom. The next well-attested king, Sarduri I, set up 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 beyond Lake Urmia. Under them a defensive federation became an empire that could challenge Assyria for control of the region's trade routes.

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 huge 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. Their huge storage capacity shows how carefully the state collected and shared out the harvest.

For two centuries, war and diplomacy took turns. Urartu suffered a serious defeat in 714 BC, when the Assyrian king Sargon II campaigned in the region, sacked the sanctuary of Musasir and carried off its treasures. Yet the kingdom recovered and kept building, 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

Modern engineers are most impressed by Urartian water engineering. 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 work today. Urartian builders also dammed mountain valleys to make reservoirs, and several of these artificial lakes are still in use. These works turned a dry plateau into land that could feed cities. Building them took surveying skill and the ability to organise large numbers of workers.

Irrigation brought orchards and vineyards. In the storerooms of excavated fortresses, archaeologists have found rows of huge clay jars marked with their capacity, along with charred grain, grape seeds and traces of wine and sesame oil. Cattle, sheep and horses were central to the economy, and Urartian horses were prized across the Near East. The state kept careful accounts. Its standard jar marks are an early sign of officials measuring and taxing the surplus harvest.

Urartian metalworkers were just as admired. Bronze cauldrons with bull-headed handles, decorated helmets, shields, quivers and delicate belt plaques have turned up from the Armenian Highlands to Greek and Etruscan sites, so Urartian workshops clearly sold far beyond their own borders. Many of these objects carry royal inscriptions: even luxury goods advertised the king's authority.

Gods and sacred places

Most of what we know about the Urartian gods comes from a long inscription carved into the rock niches at Meher Dur near Van. It 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 credited their victories to Haldi, and campaigns often set out from his sanctuaries.

Urartian temples were compact square towers with thick walls, set inside fortress courtyards. Around them archaeologists have found altars, the remains of sacrifices and stelae recording gifts of livestock. The most famous of these shrines was the sanctuary of Musasir, shown in an Assyrian relief with a columned porch and a triangular gable. Its sack by Sargon II in 714 BC was a heavy religious and political blow to Urartu.

Burial customs varied. The elite were laid in rock-cut chambers 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 centred on powerful gods who protected the community, with little sign of elaborate ideas about a personal afterlife.

The fall of the kingdom

Urartu ceased to exist in the early sixth century BC, and we know less about this stage than about any other part of its history. No Urartian inscription describes the end of the state. The royal texts simply stop, and the next written sources to mention this territory are already Persian and call the region Armina. Historians therefore have to piece the fall together indirectly, from archaeology and from the history of Urartu's neighbours.

It does not help that Urartu's main outside observer disappeared at the same time. Assyria — Urartu's chief rival, and the source of the richest foreign accounts of it — itself collapsed in 612 BC. Just as Urartu was nearing its end, the steady stream of records about it dried up too. That is why the exact date and circumstances of the fall are still an open question.

Historians usually point to several pressures at once, including Median expansion from the east and raids 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 uncovered a destruction layer with traces of fire, and this fortress was one of the largest building projects of the late period. Still, the destruction of one fortress does not explain the fall of a whole state.

A second, non-military explanation gets more attention today. Urartian power rested on fortresses, storerooms and a tightly centralised system for collecting and sharing out goods. A system like that is strong as long as the centre works, and quickly becomes useless once the centre stops gathering and handing out the harvest. So the surviving sources cannot tell us for certain whether Urartu was conquered or collapsed from within. The safest answer is that outside pressure and weaknesses in the system itself worked together.

No one disputes that the state disappeared while much of what it had built survived. In the following centuries the Armenian Highlands came under Median and then Achaemenid rule. A united Armenian kingdom would reach its greatest extent much later, under Tigran the Great.

From Urartu to Armenia

The Urartian state disappeared in the early sixth century BC, but the landscape it had shaped remained. Canals kept flowing, fortress mounds stayed visible, and settlements founded by Urartian kings often lived on as villages and towns. Through a long chain of sound changes, Erebuni gave its name to Yerevan. The city officially dates its founding to Argishti's inscription of 782 BC, which makes it older than Rome.

Ancient Armenian tradition kept a memory of this era in the form of legend. 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 scholars attribute those works to Menua, but the legend shows that people never stopped explaining and reinterpreting the monuments.

For historians today, Urartu matters because it gives the first detailed picture, from both texts and excavations, of organised life in the Armenian Highlands. It also shows how history is pieced together. Royal inscriptions, enemy chronicles, excavated storerooms and later legends each tell part of the story, and only by reading them together can we work out what actually happened.