Cuneiform Urartian inscription on the left of a temple door dating to the reign of Argišti I (r. 786–764 BCE)
The terms Urartian and Vanic are the conventional names for the language spoken by the inhabitants of the ancient kingdom of Urartu (860-585 BCE), situated in the region of Lake Van. Its capital, Tushpa, stood near the site of the modern city of Van, on the Armenian Highland in Anatolia, in what is now eastern Turkey. The language was likely spoken by most of the population around Lake Van and in the upper reaches of the Zab Valley.
The earliest attestations of Urartian date to the 9th century BCE. It ceased to be written after the fall of the Urartian state in 585 BCE, and it is generally assumed to have disappeared following the kingdom’s collapse. It was probably replaced by an early form of Armenian, perhaps during the period of Achaemenid Persian rule, although the first written examples of Armenian do not appear until the 5th century CE.
Urartian was an ergative, agglutinative language that belonged neither to the Semitic nor to the Indo-European families, but to the Hurro-Urartian family, whose only other known member is Hurrian. It survives today through numerous inscriptions found across the former kingdom of Urartu, all written in Assyrian cuneiform.
Urartian is closely related to Hurrian, a somewhat better-documented language attested from around 2000 to 1200 BCE and written by native speakers until roughly 1350 BCE. Both languages appear to have developed independently from a common ancestor around 2000 BCE. Urartian is not a direct continuation of any known Hurrian dialect. Igor M. Diakonoff and other scholars have also proposed possible links between the Hurro-Urartian languages and the Northeast Caucasian language family.
