OS 164 - The Rise of Urartu

These are the oldest stories, online at oldeststories.net. History rarely has clean start dates. Everything typically emerges out of what came before and people in the moment rarely notice that they're in a new age until the new age has well and truly arisen. The kingdom we now call Ratu is an exception. We don't have an exact year of its founding, but somewhere around 835, a fellow named Sardurie, son of Lutipri, changed the nature of society in the Armenian Highlands in a way that wasn't simply building on what came before him. The thing you hear most often about Sardurie is that he moved the capital of Ratu to the city of Tushpa, the modern day city of Van on the eastern shore of Lake Van. But we're going to see that this is untrue in a profound sort of way. Instead, we're going to discuss how he invented the kingdom of Ratu out of whole cloth. Importantly, something that also probably isn't true, but it is both true and false in interesting ways. In any case, we're about to get deep into the most profound and sudden technological and social revolution in ancient Near Eastern history, the sudden and unexpected birth of a kingdom to rival the Assyrian Empire amidst a miserable and desolate hellscape. So last time, we ended with a discussion of the fact that Ratu, at least the kingdom we're talking about, didn't exist as far as we can tell prior to about 840 BCE. The references to Ratu in Assyrian sources prior to that are clearly referring to a different state. The Ratu that we're interested in was called by its own people, BI-Nili, or the land of the BI people. Possibly kingdom of the BI people, we're not actually totally sure what that Inili at the end means we're sort of approximating based on the meaning in Hurrian, Ratu being a related language to Hurrian. But one that interestingly, we don't fully understand yet, we mostly read it because it's pretty close to Hurrian, it's basically a dialect. We read it through that lens a lot of the time, but the corpus of Arartian texts just isn't big enough for us to know the Arartian language as its own dedicated thing. Anyway, prior to the year 840, we have absolutely 100% no idea where these BI people were or what they were doing. Linguistically, like I said, they were related to the Hurrians and if they hadn't built their own kingdom, we probably wouldn't have enough to distinguish them from the rest of the Hurrians. We do guess that they were probably originally from somewhere in the southern parts of the mountains because surgery is drawing heavily from Assyrian cultural practices, so it makes sense that the BI people might have been from a border region, but that's honestly guesswork. Another guess is they may have been from the region around Musassir, a holy city of the Storm god Haldi that was quite significant in the royal theology, but Haldi was worshipped widely throughout Highlands, so it's not totally clear there in that way either. A third guess is that they were indigenous to the eastern shore of Lake Van and they could have been. It seems pretty clear, however, that Sardurri himself seems to have been a migrant into that region as he founds BI nilly. And while it's possible that Sardurri was some kind of wandering adventurer who arrived in Bia territory, then took over the Bia people, then formed a kingdom. It's also possible and narratively simpler to suggest that he was probably already the chief of the Bia people, or at least one branch of them, and he led his people to the East Lake Van region where they settled down. What we can say for sure is that by 832, BI nilly has been founded as a settled territorial state. Sardurri is the king and they have either conquered or confederated enough local tribes to be a notable figure, even all the way down in Assyria, only maybe three years after their founding. I say that the exact year of foundation is unclear, but the foundation moment is typically claimed to be the year that Sardurri founded the city of Tushpa, which is the modern city of Van on the eastern shore of Lake Van. He seems to have founded this city from nothing. East Lake Van is a decently farmable area fed by a few rivers, but there doesn't seem to have been a good, constantly flowing river at Tushpa itself. It's fed by a seasonal river only. And so somehow in the space of relatively few years, he constructs a fortress along a river that only occasionally flows, establishing one of the most largest and most enduring cities in the entire region. He builds a fortress that is a full technological step ahead of anything else of its time, and it still stands in part today in the city of Van. And then because it hasn't got a reliable water system, he develops a complex, sister-in-artificial spring water system, then he terraces the nearby mountain sides, integrating drainage and rainwater collection into the terraces, and then he begins to adjust the local agriculture to blend Mesopotamian canal fed agriculture with the demands and crops available to him in the Armenian Highlands, which is still wheat, but according to some sources, it might be a slightly different cultivar of wheat or barley rather. And then he introduces writing to the region, adopting a formal, assyrian style that shows tremendous familiarity with advanced Mesopotamian education. And if you go by the conventional dating, he does all of this between 835 and 828, an entire seven years. And this is why it's really hard to talk about the foundation of Urartu. But even before we dig into the details of all this, we need to ask how certain we are that all of this really is new, is surgery actually just inventing this stuff whole cloth, or had it always been there in the region, and he's just kind of taking credit for it. But here's the thing, it could be that some or all of these innovations were already being practiced by some of the Armenian Highlanders, maybe even in the Lake Van region. The issue is that all of these things show up, extremely spontaneously, in the archaeological record. If any of them were being practiced prior to Sardurie, he was on a very small scale, and he at least gets credit for systematizing and integrating these new systems in a larger kingdom. But for example, fortress building as a general concept isn't new. And some people do suggest that there may have been some kind of proto-terracing in the Highlands region before Sardurie. But what we see in Urartu is certainly at least a noticeable step up here. And then of course, I am giving credit to Sardurie himself for all these innovations, which is kind of like how the North Koreans credit Kim Jong-il with the invention of the helicopter and the writing of 1500 books and the designing of all hydroelectric stations in all of North Korea. But honestly, if Sardurie actually personally invented all of the things I'm giving him credit for, it would make him one of the most enduring brilliant leaders in the whole of world history. And it's not unfair to be a little bit skeptical, oh yeah, he did all those things. But consider this, if he found himself in an extremely diverse region, under extreme pressures both from in migration, lack of food supplies and external invasion, and then he managed to cultivate a network of people who were collectively able to adapt previously existing designs and then implement them in a novel environment at a high standard while also simultaneously establishing a regional power that still says good things about Sardurie himself. And so we are going to keep giving the king all the credit because honestly, I don't think we know the names of any actual living Bia people aside from him during his entire reign. Even Sardurie himself is a huge mystery. His name itself means gift of the goddess Sardie, which is a local variant of Ishtar, but he gives us very little else to work with. So Sardurie comes from somewhere and he ends up as the head of the Bia people and they all end up on the eastern shore of Lake Van. Now I'm going to suggest without really knowing that as he takes power sometime around 840, I would say you know at the earlier end of when it could possibly have happened because he does a whole lot, but I would say that as he takes power, he probably has a plan because I can't imagine you do all this just accidentally. But step one in his grand master plan is to find a city from nothing. I mean the place where Tushpa is is not a terrible site. They were probably already some people living there. And it's got decent farming, it's got at least seasonal flowing water, some springs. But one suspects that he selected that site mostly for the tall, rocky outcropping that would become Sardurie's great legacy for the next 2800 years. It begins with Sardurie sending workmen up to the top of the outcropp, but a hundred meters up and quite sheer to clear away the soil and flatten down the bedrock itself into form for his planned fortress. Then he quarried out massive stone blocks up to ten tons each six meters long. And they were all hauled and then lifted, hauled a pretty long way and then lifted straight up one hundred meters up that cliff to the build site. We got no idea how they were lifted. It could have been cranes, it could have been a temporary ramp, it could have been aliens, probably aliens. But once they were in place, they were placed into carved niches in the bedrock for those specific stones to sit in and then they were held in place by pure way to loan. They didn't have any mortar at all, which some people say is, wow, it's such an accomplishment. How did they do this without any mortar? But really, they didn't have the technology to make a good mortar. So they just piled the stones as best they could. So not actually a technological jump up there like some people claim, but it's still really impressive. They're carving these giant stones to sit on each other and they've set on each other for almost 3,000 years. Gaps in between the stones, they're not carved super perfectly, just very good. They were filled in by smaller rock pieces that seemed to have been like hammered into shape and then sort of hammered into gaps to fit on sight. But soon enough, you have this 4 meter high wall of a citadel that itself is about 45 meters by 13 meters. It's a decently large structure whose ruins still exist today. It's not the world's finest craftsmanship, but they seem to have either invented or imported the skill required to build it from scratch. And given the engineering challenges, I think they did a fine job. With the fortress completed, the plane at its base could be settled with a city. The water supply controlled primarily from the wells within the fortress and rainwater harvesting cisterns. And this plane seems to have hosted a mix of pasteurage and agricultural lands, with fishing occurring in the lake, and terracing beginning on the mountains to expand the population capacity of the Lake Van Region. It wasn't all engineering and architecture though. Sarduria ranged at all through the introduction of a writing and a stable state apparatus. Sadly, we only have two inscriptions from his time, but the first is a set of laws, for perhaps religious rituals. The text is very badly damaged, and it's hard to tell the purpose exactly. One reconstructed translation, for example, has the line, "If a man substitutes a life," possibly meaning he has someone else serve in some such way as maybe in a draft, or he's got some other obligation, and he's having someone substitute for him. If a man substitutes a life, then the man will give a number of oxen and three cows, and this at least is to partially offset someone's service obligation. He'll then give some unreadable number of oxen and seven cows in sacrifice as a funerary offering. Possibly on the theory that by avoiding this service, the man is ritually dying, or perhaps it's just to offset the cost of the substitute. The whole thing is very difficult to parse, but it tells us that no matter what exactly we think is going on in this text, detailed regulations of some sort are being recorded, indicating the presence, even in the first few years of Sardurie's reign, of a complex and possibly mesopotamian style judicial and regulatory system. We get even more sense of Assyrian borrowing with the more complete of his inscriptions. This one's carved all over the Tushba fortress, and it reads, "Inscription of Sardurie, son of Lutibri, great king, strong king, king of the world, king of the land, Nairi, king who has no equal, marvelous shepherd, fearless in battle, king who subdues those in subordinate to him. I am Sardurie, son of Lutibri, king of kings, the one who has received the tribute of all kings. Thus speaks Sardurie, son of Lutibri, I carried these limestone blocks from the city of al-Ni'onu, and I built this wall. Now, quite strong, he must have been to have personally carried these ten-ton blocks all the way from the somewhat distant city of al-Ni'onu. But more interestingly, is that every single one of these titles and claims, except for King of the Nairi lands, is copied from the titulary of Asher Nasser Paul of Assyria, the great king who only a generation ago has passed away. It's interesting that the titles of Assyrian kings were known about and recited so far north, but it also shows that Sardurie is very clearly taking a lot of his ideas about kingship from the most successful, if psychopathic, king in his local area. Not a bad plan, all things considered, and as far as we can tell, there was never an apparent failure in the overall government system, though, to be fair, they do get invaded before we can really tell if they would have endured in the long run. That said, even though the Sardurie government likely ran on writing, the rest of society remains almost stubbornly illiterate. Interestingly, we can be fairly certain that this wasn't just a matter of not finding the records since as soon as the kingdom of Urartu falls, writing vanishes completely in the region. In the Persian period that comes shortly after the fall of Urartu, the local Persians appear to have no connection at all with the previous written language. When we know that the Persian Empire would often adopt the local language, at least in some of their official business, making heavy use of bilingual or trilingual documents and monuments. To maximize their connection to the local populace. So the fact that the Persians seem to have been unaware that there was a written Urartu in language, despite the Hurrian language still being spoken in the region, suggests that there had never been any real penetration of the writing into the wider population for the whole of the B. and Nilly period, kingdom period. There is a larger B.I. Nilly strategy for holding territory as the kingdom expands, but we don't know for sure if it wasn't invented by Sardurri. As much as I like begging him up, he is a fun character to really get impressed by. His kingdom never does extend too far beyond the shores of Lake Van, though he was certainly in control of the whole area, including a variety of formerly disparate groups, and he was significant enough to have drawn the eye of the Assyrian king Shalmanassur in 832. Or more accurately, his Tertan Diane Asher went up there in 832. Still in that campaign, that year, we have a claim of Assyrian victory made by the Assyrians, but there's no real sign that Tushpa was plundered or even struggled in any way. Indeed, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that Diane Asher was ultimately beaten back or proved unable to overcome the fortress of Tushpa, as he only claims to have fought within a valley, killed some of the enemy, and returned without notable plunder, which, of course, is often a sign of an Assyrian defeat. Well, such an invasion might have even worked in Sardiris favor, whether or not the Assyrians won. Just as in the West, it was increasingly recognized by the West, I mean Syria, the West of Assyria is the Syrian region of the Neohittites and the Arameans. Over there, it was increasingly recognized by a lot of the petty kings of the Near East, and the only way to defend against Assyrian aggression was through unity. And Sardiris' strong position defensively and strategically, his suddenly wealthy economic base, and, of course, whatever army he had used to establish himself, seems to have made him the second-largest fish in the pond after the Assyrians. And thus, he is now the only realistic option for leading a regional defense against further Assyrian incursions. We have no idea what the balance was between peaceful integration and militaristic conquest, though given the rapidity of behind-nilly growth and the pressures faced in the region, at least some amount of diplomatic coalition building seems to have been in play. But let's not fool ourselves, either. Assyria was not the only tool, and probably not the primary tool in the behind-nilly expansion. Sardiris was a warrior king, leading a coalition of clans, effectively at constant war with every neighbor who didn't submit. From 832 and still Sardiris' death a few years later, this warrior-nobility exploited the resources of the Tushpa region, plus probably whatever they were able to plunder from neighbors, in order to finance a military modernization that saw this warrior coalition transform or perhaps augment itself with a more Assyrian-style army, with kits similar to that found in Mesopotamia. They're pulling cavalry from the mountain horse folk, but they're using iron weapons and armor in a very similar way to how the Assyrians are using it, with the notable difference that the behind-nilly iron weapons and armor seemed to be a cut above the Assyrian iron tools because of the rich crafting tradition of the mountains. We're going to get into the exquisite metalworking of the ancient Armenian Highlands, but not today. Anyway, even with all that, with the better cavalry from having the horse people right there and with the better arms and armor, they were probably inferior in number and professionalism to the Assyrian army. Their main advantage was experience in the Highlands that allowed for more clever tactics, as well as the almost impenetrable fortresses that neither their Highland neighbors or even the Assyrians were able to overcome. So, we don't know why Sir Dury died, so soon after establishing his kingdom, but talking about war, it doesn't seem impossible to think that he fell in battle, aggressively expanding his nascent kingdom, and so by 828, only four years after the Assyrian invasion, he'd already managed to establish behind-nilly on firm foundations for future generations, but at this point his story just sort of ends. I mean, it could be that Sir Dury was an old man by this time that he spent most of his life building up to the grand climax of establishing a Tushpa. His son Ispwini seems to have probably been at a decent age at this point, so Sir Dury may have been fairly old, but we don't really have a sense for the details that finally, and of course, a man whose fighting quite as often as Sir Dury, it's hard to imagine that he went out anyway except fighting when we know that the kingdom was rapidly expanding at this point in time. Which gets us in the year 828 to the second king of Aratu, Ispwini. Now, Ispwini was either a deeply pious man, or he's a man determined to use religion to solve the massive problems of holding together a deeply heterogeneous nation. We know that his personal God was a fellow named "Uwa" about whom I'm not sure we know hardly anything, but Ispwini is most notable for his profound patronage of the cult of Khaldi. Now, very early in Ispwini's reign, and possibly the very first thing he did, he went down to the city of Ardini, and either conquered it or politely offered his own religious submission to the Khaldi temple of the city. Now, you would think that did he conquer it, did he offer religious submission, those seem like opposite ends of a spectrum, but the truth is we really don't know and we kind of can't tell, Ardini is the city that the Assyrians called Musasir, and it was the chief city of a pretty significant maybe kingdom in the region, or it was just the chief city of a region, again hard to tell, but it clearly always enjoyed a special status both among the people of the Highlands and among the kingdom of Biainili. His status was primarily due to the ancient temple of Khaldi, a warrior god who sometimes had wings, always had a fantastic beard, and liked to either stand on or ride lions. He was such a warrior god that his temples are often not called temples, but houses of weapons, and they seem to have been decorated with, you guessed it, all manner of weapons, which I guess is better than being decorated with skulls and bones and stuff, but still not a peaceful kind of fellow. A god like this would naturally be very attractive to Ishpwini. He's bent on expanding his father's kingdom with relentless annual campaigning in Assyrian style with his Assyrian style army. But the influence of Khaldi in the wider region seems to have been pretty significant, despite how little we know about the god nowadays. You see the name of the city in Hurrian languages, I mean the city Ardini, that literally just means the city, and there's a decent chance that it's one of the oldest cities in the region. Certainly, the city and its god Haldi were known to the ancient Sumerians of the early Bronze Age, being mentioned by King Shoggi, and seems to have been well established already in King Shoggi's time, that's the decades before 2000 BCE. So this is an ancient city indeed, and its divine influence is felt all throughout the region. Adopting the god Haldi was a move to unify the people of the Highlands, and a move to empower the beignilling military, and in both senses it seems to have done absolute wonders. Ispwini was probably also personally quite pious, and seems reverentially proud in some of his inscriptions to have such a prestigious divine patron. Now, speaking of Ispwini's inscriptions, he takes the same Assyrian styles, but his reign is actually the first to use the Orrartian language, adapted from Herian Cuniform, which itself of course borrowed and adapted Assyrian Cuniform way back probably in the Middle Bronze Age or thereabouts. He does however make extensive use of bilingual Orrartian Assyrian inscriptions, which is interesting because it tells us that despite the widespread, probably deliberate illiteracy, there's at least someone in his realm who could read each language. And this tells us that there's a Assyrian style or Mesopotamian style education system getting implanted in the beignuly kingdom, and they're also importing Herian scribal systems as well, which includes Herian scribal schools, Herian scribes to teach ongoing generations how to write the language that they've been speaking for hundreds of years or whatever. It's very interesting. This may represent an effort to increase literacy in his rapidly growing kingdom, but also it might not have done. It might have just been, "Hey, let's get just enough literacy to run our government and then we're happy." We don't really know what motivated Ishtpweeney or what he was trying to do. All we can tell is that following his adoption of the god Haldi, beignuly began to grow, reaching out from its roots around Tushpa to encompass the entire Lake Van region within only ten or so years. And everywhere he went, he built fortresses just like the ones at Tushpa. Not always the same floor plan, so to speak, as each one was, of course, crafted to fit whatever mountain peak where it was going to be situated to command over the local region. But it's always the same, basically, ten tons, six meter long, cyclopian stones worked onto solid bedrock. The evidence of a Rartian engineering increases in Ishtpweeney's reign, with more ornately worked metal and stone objects all spread over a larger region. Aside from the adoption of the new god, it's hard to tell how much of this is new to Ishtpweeney is innovating here, and how much he's just following his father's pattern and plan in a larger area. But either way, by the year 820, where it's only some fifteen years into this new kingdom, and already, with just two kings, something remarkable and enduring has been created. But before we close out on that note today, there's one super neat story from the city of Ardeni. The temple and city, so enduring over the centuries, would ultimately be sacked by Sargon the second of Assyria in the Great Campaign of 714, which we will be covering in depth at some point later. The site would then lay abandoned for basically all the rest of history, the god-haldy getting largely forgotten except possibly in a few local words. But then, in the 1850s, so 175 years ago, early archaeologists were traipsing around the Ottoman Empire, hunting down leads on ancient ruins, you know, the way early archaeologists like to do. This expedition was led by a British explorer, Felix Marie Charles Texier, and it seems to have found the site of the temple of colony and made just enough drawings to demonstrate that yes, this was the temple, and yes, it was pretty awesome, even after 2700 years of neglect. About 2600, I guess, because it's the 1850s, not nowadays. Math is hard. Anyway, either this team or an immediate follow-up team spent a period of time collecting artifacts and notes working real hard, you know, their early archaeologists, they're not up to modern standards, but they're definitely doing their best, you know, kind of hostile climate. But then, on the way home, they've got their wagons, they're taking it all back to whichever museum they want to take it back to, and the entire expedition was attacked by Muslim raiders who slaughtered them to the last man and destroyed or stole the artifacts. Now, that's, you know, that's a sad story, it's not great when people are attacked by bandits, but no one else knew the location of the temple of colony. No one survived to tell anyone where they had been working. No one knew where the city of Musassia was, or the city of Ardini, that's the same city to different names. And then, despite the subsequent 175 years that have seen multiple expeditions returning to that general area, no one has ever again found the lost temple of colony. Now, is that story true? I think it might be though there are enough variations of the tale and people casting doubt on it that it's at least somewhat apocryphal, perhaps some of the details are magnified or altered in the telling and retelling, but what is certainly true is that someone does seem to have found the temple of colony at one point and lost it. And it's a reminder that the city of Ardini, a city literally called the city for its religious strategic and trade importance, it's still out there, it's still waiting for an ambitious explorer to once again uncover its ruins. I know that some of you are in school or thinking about going on to college that are listening right now, if you're interested in history but wondering what practical value there might be in studying it, think about the lost temple of colony, or the lost capital of the Akkadian Empire, or the lost capital of Matani, and realize that there's so much left to uncover, even in a region as thoroughly studied at his Mesopotamia, and that's to say nothing of Central America where we've uncovered like 2% of everything that's out there. Just if you're thinking about being an historian, or an archaeologist, or anything related to that, archaeology, the getting there and digging, AI is not going to replace that, not for a long, long time. Consider it, seriously, but that's neither here nor there. Next time, we're going to pick back up with a reign of Ishpuhini and his son and co-regent Menua, the two of them form an interesting sort of tag team that becomes a distinctive pattern of B.I. nearly royal transitions. So join us next time, as the kingdom expands yet again, tripling in size in the next decade, and begins to look more and more like a power that the Assyrian Empire itself is starting to hit that rough patch, has reason to fear. Thank you for listening.