Urartu

The Akkadian name of the kingdom of Lake Van, conventionally Latinized in scholarship as Urarṭu, is written in cuneiform with several orthographies; the spelling shown here, ú-ra-aš-tu, is the one used in the Babylonian column of Darius’s Behistun inscription, with the same alternation of š for r that runs through the Assyro-Babylonian writings of the name. The name first appears as Uruaṭri, a grouping of highland lands named by Shalmaneser I of Assyria in the thirteenth century BCE, and hardens into Urarṭu in the Neo-Assyrian annals of the early first millennium, when the kingdom had become Assyria’s most formidable northern rival. The royal inscriptions of Sargon II, including the account of his eighth campaign against king Rusa in 714 BCE, are among the fullest Assyrian records of the wars in the mountains.

The Assyrian exonym is the form that travels, and the kingdom’s own name, Biainili, never left the highland. It is Urarṭu, not Biainili, that the Hebrew Bible preserves as Araraṭ, and the Assyrian name therefore became the resting-place of the ark and the byword for the lost mountain kingdom. The same name was reused, two centuries after Urartu fell, to render the new Achaemenid province of Armenia in the Babylonian text at Behistun, binding the old name to the land that succeeded it. The whole later life of the name, biblical, geographic, and scholarly, descends from what Assyrian scribes called the enemy beyond their northern frontier.

Biainili is the kingdom’s name for itself, attested in its own royal inscriptions in the Urartian language and the borrowed Neo-Assyrian cuneiform in which they were carved. It is a plural or collective formation, “the lands of Biaina,” Biaina being the core territory around Lake Van; the kings style themselves rulers “of the Bia lands,” much as a Hittite or Assyrian king ruled a cluster of territories under one crown. The lake itself, and the modern city of Van on its eastern shore, still carry an echo of the old central name.

This is the rarest kind of name to recover: the genuine endonym of a kingdom known to everyone else by an enemy’s word. Where Urarṭu fills the Assyrian annals and reaches the Bible as Ararat, Biainili stays inside the kingdom’s own monuments and effectively died with it, leaving almost no trace in the wider record. The Armenians who later took the highland were a different people with a different language and gave it yet another name again. Few states have left so complete a gap between what they were called and what they called themselves, and fewer still have had their self-name survive only in the lake at their heart.

Araraṭ is the Hebrew form of the Assyrian Urarṭu, and in the Bible it names the kingdom as a real northern power, not yet a mountain. Jeremiah summons “the kingdoms of Araraṭ, Minni, and Ashkenaz” against Babylon (51:27), listing Urartu beside Mannea and the Scythians among the peoples of the north; the assassins of Sennacherib flee to “the land of Araraṭ” (2 Kings 19:37). The Hebrew preserves the Assyrian name with the loss of the initial vowel and a softening of the final consonant, transmitting it through the same Mesopotamian world in which the prophets placed their geography.

On this page Araraṭ is the exonym’s furthest reach in time, the form in which a vanished Iron Age kingdom outlived itself in scripture. The same Hebrew word, in “the mountains of Araraṭ” where the ark comes to rest (Genesis 8:4), later detached from the kingdom and fastened onto a single peak, the snow-capped cone now called Mount Ararat. That narrowing, from a country spanning the highland to one mountain among several candidates, is treated on its own page; here the point is the start of the chain, the moment the Assyrians’ name for Urartu entered the book that would carry it to the whole world.

The Alaródioi are a people Herodotus lists twice, grouped with the Saspires in the eighteenth satrapy of Darius and again in the muster of Xerxes’ army, equipped like the Colchians of the Caucasus. The name does not obviously resemble Urarṭu, but many scholars have connected the two, reading Alarodioi as a Greek rendering, via an Urartian or Caucasian intermediary, of the same highland name, and treating the Alarodians as the descendants of the Urartians surviving into the Achaemenid period under Greek eyes. The identification is old and attractive but far from secure.

The entry is marked disputed because the equation rests on a contested chain of sound-changes and on geographic placement rather than on any explicit ancient statement. If it holds, Alaródioi is the only Greek echo of Urartu under anything like its own regional name, the kingdom glimpsed not through the Assyrian Urarṭu but through a separate northern channel into the Greek ethnographic tradition. If it does not, it is a reminder that the Urartians left so faint a footprint in the classical record that even their possible appearances are arguable; the Greeks who named Armenia after the Persians’ Armina may never have known the older kingdom at all.