Urartian language
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Urartian is the name for the language spoken by the people of the ancient kingdom of Urartu in northeast Anatolia (present-day Turkey), in the region of Lake Van.
| Urartian | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vannic | ||||
| Native to | Armenian Highland | |||
| Region | Urartu | |||
| Era | attested 9th–6th century BCE | |||
| Language family | Hurro-Urartian
| |||
| Language codes | ||||
| ISO 639-3 | xur | |||
| Linguist List | xur | |||
| ||||
Urartian cuneiform tablet on display at the Erebuni Museum in Yerevan.
Urartian was a language isolate, which was neither Semitic nor Indo-European, but a member of the Hurro-Urartian family.
There is a hypothesis that suggests that besides the cuneiform inscriptions of the Urartian language, Urartu had a native hieroglyphic writing system. Armenian scientist Artak Movsisyan published a partial attempt deciphering of Urartian hieroglyphs, saying that they were written in an early form of Armenian.
Urartian Language Media
Urartian inscription in Urartian Hieroglyphs: aqarqi
Urartian inscription in Urartian Hieroglyphs: ṭerusi
Related pages
More reading
- C. B. F. Walker: section Cuneiform in Reading the Past. Published by British Museum Press, 1996, ISBN 0-7141-8077-7.
- J. Friedrich: Urartäisch, in Handbuch der Orientalistik I, ii, 1-2, pp. 31–53. Leiden, 1969.
- Gernot Wilhelm: Urartian, in R. Woodard (ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World’s Ancient Languages. Cambridge, 2004.
- Mirjo Salvini: Geschichte und Kultur der Urartäer. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt, 1995.