Urartian language
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| Urartian | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Urartu, Armenian Highland | |
| Language extinction: | c. 6th century BCE | |
| Language family: | Hurro-Urartian Urartian |
|
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | mis | |
| ISO 639-3: | xur | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Urartian (also called Vannic, in older literature also "Chaldean") is the conventional name for the language spoken by the inhabitants of the ancient kingdom of Urartu in the region of Lake Van in modern-day Turkey in the highlands of Armenia. [1]
First attested in the 9th century BC, Urartian goes into decline after the fall of the Urartian state in 585 BCE, and by 500 BCE it was likely was confined to the elite, while the common people spoke Armenian.[2]
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[edit] Classification
Urartian was an agglutinative language, which belongs to neither the Semitic nor the Indo-European families but to the Hurro-Urartian family.[3] It survives in many inscriptions found in the area of the Urartu kingdom, written in the Assyrian cuneiform script. There have been claims[4] of a separate autochthonous script of "Urartian hieroglyphs" but these remain unsubstantiated.
Urartian is closely related to Hurrian, though not derived from it. [5] Although Urartian and Hurrian are related, it is now fairly clear that the two languages developed quite independently from the third millennium onwards. [6]
[edit] Decipherment
Urartu was discovered in 1827 by F. E. Schulz. Schulz also made copies of several cuneiform inscriptions at Tušpa, but made no attempt at decipherment.
After the decipherment of Assyrian cuneiform in the 1850s, Schulz'drawings became the basis of deciphering the Urartian language. It soon became clear that it was unrelated to any known language, and attempts at decipherment based on known languages of the region failed (Georgian: F. Lenormant 1871, Armenian: A. D. Mordtmann 1872–1877). Decipherment only made progress after World War I, with the discovery of Urartian-Assyrian bilingual inscriptions at Kelišin and Topzawä, (A. Götze 1930, 1935; J. Friedrich 1933).
In 1963, a grammar of Urartian was published by G. A. Melikishvili in Russian, appearing in German translation in 1971. In the 1970s, the genetic relation with Hurrian was established by I. M. Diakonoff.
[edit] Corpus
The oldest delivered texts originate from the reign from Sarduri I, from the late 9th century BCE.[7] With the fall of the realm of Urartu approximately 200 years later disappeared the written sources from his time.
Approximately two hundred inscriptions written in the Urartian language, which adopted and modified the cuneiform script, have been discovered to date. [8].
[edit] Writing
[edit] Cuneiform
Urartian cuneiform is a standardized simplification of Neo-Assyrian cuneiform. Other than in Assyrian, each sign only expresses a single sound value. The sign gi 𒄀 has the special function of expressing a hiatus, e.g. u-gi-iš-ti for Uīšdi. A variant script with non-overlapping wedges was in use for rock inscriptions.
[edit] Hieroglyphs
Urartian was also rarely written in the "Anatolian hieroglyphs" used for the Luwian language. Evidence for this is restricted to Altıntepe.
There are suggestions that besides the Luwian hieroglyphic inscriptions, Urartu also had a native hieroglyphic script. The inscription corpus is too sparse to substantiate the hypothesis. It remains unclear whether the symbols in question form a coherent writing system, or represent just a multiplicity of uncoordinated expressions of proto-writing or ad-hoc drawings.[9] What can be identified with a certain confidence are two symbols or "hieroglyphs" found on vessels, representing certain units of measurement: 
for aqarqi and 
for ṭerusi. This is known because some vessels were labelled both in cuneiform and with these symbols.[10]
[edit] See also
[edit] Literature
- 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.
- Jeffrey J. Klein, Urartian Hieroglyphic Inscriptions from Altintepe, Anatolian Studies, Vol. 24, (1974), 77-94.
[edit] References
- ^ People of Ancient Assyria: Their Inscriptions and Correspondence - Page 89 by Jørgen Laessøe
- ^ J.Lendering, Urartu/Armenia article by Jona Lendering
- ^ The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East - Page 292 by Eric M. Meyers, American Schools of Oriental Research
- ^ Jeffrey J. Klein, Urartian Hieroglyphic Inscriptions from Altintepe, Anatolian Studies, Vol. 24, (1974), 77-94
- ^ Academic American Encyclopedia - Page 198
- ^ Wilhelm 1982: 5
- ^ Urartu - Page 65 by Boris Borisovich Piotrovskiĭ
- ^ The international standard Bible encyclopedia - Page 234 by Geoffrey William Bromiley
- ^ Paul Zimansky, Urartian Material Culture As State Assemblage: An Anomaly in the Archaeology of Empire. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, No. 299/300, The Archaeology of Empire in Ancient Anatolia (Aug. - Nov., 1995), pp. 103-115
- ^ Mirjo Salvini: Geschichte und Kultur der Urartäer. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1995. ISBN 3-534-01870-2
