Urartian language

Infobox Language
name=Urartian
region=Urartu, Armenian Highland
extinct=c. 6th century BCE
familycolor=Isolate
fam1=Hurro-Urartian
iso2=mis
iso3=xur

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 that was located in the region of Lake Van in in the highlands of Armenia, modern-day Turkey [People of Ancient Assyria: Their Inscriptions and Correspondence - Page 89 by Jørgen Laessøe] .

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. [J.Lendering, Urartu/Armenia article by Jona Lendering [http://www.livius.org/arl-arz/armenia/armenia.html] ]

Classification

Urartian was an agglutinative language, which belongs to neither the Semitic nor the Indo-European families but to the Hurro-Urartian family. [The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East - Page 292 by Eric M. Meyers, American Schools of Oriental Research] It survives in many inscriptions found in the area of the Urartu kingdom, written in the Assyrian cuneiform script. There have been claims [Jeffrey J. Klein, Urartian Hieroglyphic Inscriptions from Altintepe, Anatolian Studies, Vol. 24, (1974), 77-94] of a separate autochthonous script of "Urartian hieroglyphs" but these remain unsubstantiated.

Urartian is closely related to Hurrian, though not derived from it. [Academic American Encyclopedia - Page 198] Although Urartian and Hurrian are related, it is now fairly clear that the two languages developed quite independently from the third millennium onwards. [Wilhelm 1982: 5]

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.

Corpus

The oldest delivered texts originate from the reign of Sarduri I, from the late 9th century BCE. [Urartu - Page 65 by Boris Borisovich Piotrovskiĭ] and were produced until the fall of the realm of Urartu approximately 200 years later.

Approximately two hundred inscriptions written in the Urartian language, which adopted and modified the cuneiform script, have been discovered to date. [The international standard Bible encyclopedia - Page 234 by Geoffrey William Bromiley] .

Writing

Cuneiform

Urartian cuneiform is a standardized simplification of Neo-Assyrian cuneiform.Unlike in Assyrian, each sign only expresses a single sound value.The sign "gi" cuneiform|