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...
