Urartian language

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 Urartian
Language codes
ISO 639-3	xur
Linguist List	xur
Glottolog	urar1245

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.

Related pages

• Urartu

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.

Other websites

• Urartian hieroglyphs hypothesis