a Great Kingdom appeared in the land of Mt. Ararat. The “Urartian” kings fought
often with the Assyrian kings, and ultimately and disastrously with the Skythian
and Median warlords.
Unusual clarity on “Urartu” is available from Paul Zimansky, an expert on the
kingdom and its written documents. Zimansky prefers, first of all, not to call
the kingdom Urartu, but to use the name that its rulers used: Biainili. Assyrian
kings, on the other hand, consistently referred to it only as the kingdom of the
māt urarṭu, which in our terms meant “land of (Mt.) Ararat.”^52 Some sixty royal
inscriptions, some thirty clay tablets, and several hundred ownership or dedicatory
inscriptions on bronze artifacts, are written (in cuneiform script) in the “Urartian”
language, which was a cognate (and not a descendant) of Hurrian. Zimansky
believes that in Biainili the knowledge of the “Urartian” language was limited to
the palace and to other government functionaries, because evidence for the lan -
guage ends after the palace was destroyed and the kingdom abolished by Median
(or Skythian) marauders early in the sixth century BC.^53 The kings had their pro -
nouncements inscribed in the “Urartian” language either because that was the
language of the ruling family, or because there was no scribal tradition in the
vernacular of Biainili while cuneiform scribes had been writing in a Hurrian-
Urartian language for over 1000 years.
The vernacular in the Great Kingdom of Biainili was quite certainly Armenian.
The Armenian language was obviously the region’s vernacular in the fifth century
BC, when Persian commanders and Greek writers paired it with Phrygian. That it
was brought into the region between the early sixth and the early fifth century BC,
and that it immediately obliterated whatever else had been spoken there, can hardly
be supposed. Looking for words from the Hurrian language family that made their
way into Armenian, John Greppin found only sixteen: eight from Hurrian and eight
from “Urartian.” He concluded that although the Armenian language had been
contiguous to the Hurrian family it could not have been a superstrate over a
language from that family.^54 Because Proto-Armenian speakers seem to have lived
not far from Hurrian speakers our conclusion must be that the Armenian language
of Mesrop Mashtots was descended from an Indo-European language that had been
spoken in southern Caucasia in the Bronze Age.
Overall, we have good reason to locate in southern Caucasia an early form of
Indo-Iranian that over many centuries gave rise to Armenian, Greek and Phrygian.
If in the middle of the third millennium BCIndo-Iranian pastoralists began filtering
into southern Caucasia, the roots of the subgroup may have been planted. I will
speculate that by the seventeenth century BCwhat we know as Indo-Iranian may
have been spoken to the south of some natural frontiers, while to the north people
spoke a cognate from which would evolve Armenian, Phrygian and Greek. One
such frontier may have been the Araxes river, the middle and lower courses of
which served as the border between the Russian and Persian empires after 1813.
Another frontier may have been the Botan/Kentrites tributary of the upper Tigris.
In his long march Xenophon found (Anabasis4.3.1) that the Kentrites, two plethra
wide, separated the land of the Kardouchoi from Armenia.
228 The question of origins