Urartian

The language of the kingdom of Urartu, centered on Lake Van in the Armenian highland from the ninth to the sixth century BCE. Urartian is not Indo-European but the close relative of Hurrian, the two forming the small Hurro-Urartian family; it has no relation to the Armenian that later settled the same land. It survives in several hundred royal inscriptions, chiefly the building and campaign records of kings such as Argišti and Sarduri, carved on stone across the highland.

Urartian was written in a borrowed and simplified Neo-Assyrian cuneiform, taken from the south along with much of the machinery of kingship. The kingdom’s own name for itself was Biainili, “the lands of Biaina,” the country around Lake Van whose name still sounds in the lake’s modern one, Van; its Assyrian neighbors called it Urarṭu, the word that reaches the Hebrew Bible as Ararat.

@misc{onomastikon-urartian,
  author = {Rajagopal, Shriram},
  title = {Urartian},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://onomastikon.org/languages/urartian}},
  note = {Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names}
}