Several prominent Armenian academics (e.g., Armen Petrosyan) and, recently, even some western academics (like Rasmus Thorso) have suggested that the Armenians have their origins in a little-known Iron Age tribe called the “Etiuni” (or more accurately, the “Etiuhi”). This tribe supposedly spoke Armenian and lived in the upper eastern regions of the Armenian Highlands...
New Discovery of a Second Urartian Temple Built by King Menua Reveals Armenian Continuity
A surprising second temple built by the Urartian king Menua has recently been discovered by Turkish archaeologists in the ancient Armenian province of Van (modern-day Turkey). Next to the temple, an intriguing royal tomb has been discovered, as well as pottery fragments and metal artifacts. The site is currently called “Körzüt Castle” after a...
I asked AI to analyse Armenian-Urartian language similarities
OpenAI’s new chatbot called GPT-3 is the largest language model AI at the moment. It has been trained with over 175 billion parameters, including books, web texts, academic papers, and encyclopedias. So I decided to ask it some interesting questions regarding the Armenian language. We know from recent discoveries that Urartians are genetically identical...
[UPDATE] Urartian DNA: The Closest Match to Modern Armenians
This post is an update to my five-part series on “Who were the Urartians?” Right after I published my articles on the Urartian identity, a very interesting paper was published in Science magazine by the leading authors on ancient genetics, Iosif Lazaridis and David Reich. The paper is titled: “The genetic history of the...
Who were the Urartians? – Highland Genetics – [Part 5]
Genetics of the Highland Another important tool we have at our disposal to asses population dynamics (both ancient and modern) is the study of genetics. When looking at the Armenian genetics the first and foremost evidence comes to us from the mere fact that Armenians are quite uniquely considered to be proper representatives of...
Who were the Urartians? – The language – [Part 4]
What about the language? Before we dive into the similarities between the Urartian and the Armenian languages, it is important to stress that an ethnicity is never defined by language alone. One of the most common mistakes that I often hear (and read) regarding the Urartian identity is this overemphasis on the poorly defined...
Who were the Urartians? – Hayk and Haldi – [Part 3]
Yet another possibility, and perhaps complimentary to some of the previously-mentioned theories, is that the Armenian patriarch Hayk himself represents none other than the Urartian principal deity Haldi. The relation between the two has been argued convincingly before by Kavoukjian, Hacikyan, Basmajian, Franchuk, Ouzounian, Nourhan (2000–2005) yet the most striking similarities, in my opinion,...
Who were the Urartians? – Land of the forefather – [Part 2]
What’s in a name? If we want to better understand the Urartian identity we have to consider other exonyms as well as the native names (endonyms) of the country. We have to look at how others viewed the Urartians but also how both the Urartians and the Armenians self-identified. Did they consider themselves as...
Who were the Urartians? – Introduction – [Part 1]
Dear reader, it has been a while since I’ve made a post on this blog. The long delay was partially caused by the latest situation in Artsakh, after which, like many of us, I’ve lost some emotional energy for writing, and partially because I was, as much as I possibly could, researching the kingdom...
Freedom or Peace? My thoughts on the political crisis in Armenia
When I first started this blog I promised myself to never write about politics; not because it’s unimportant or outside of my personal interest, but because there are few domains that are capable of dividing a nation as much as politics. But desperate times require desperate measures so I too will weigh in on...
