The origins of Urartian language

 The origins of Urartian language

The language used in Biaina kingdom is usually labeled Urartian. This term is probably not good because it reflects the external name of a kingdom and speakers of that language almost certainly were not using it.. Various theories were proposed: Surili or Biainili or something completely different that we don't know. We will use the current convention: the Urartian.

This language is not considered IE. It is affiliated to Hurrian. Origins of both languages are obscure but their homeland must not be far from historic Armenia or even from it.

We have first genomes from Van basin where this language is recorded so we can use them for better understanding.

Instead of using distant sources I will use more proximate Bronze Age sources for fine analysis of their genomes.

The first surprising result is the strong difference between pre-Urartian BA Van and regular Iron Age Van. This result do not contradict the archaeology. There are reasons to believe that Van region witnessed a serious depopulation most probably due to Assyrian campaigns. And then a new repopulation. The new population has more complex ancestry but an important part is from Dinkha tepe Urmia region. The Dinkha tepe BIA is a pop affiliated to western regions of Urmia and North Iraq/SE Turkey. This make sense because of introduction of cult Haldi into Van region. The cultic center of god Haldi was in the south, in Musasir city.

The next finding is the presence of Trialeti Vanadzor (TVC) ancestry in both periods. TVC has large Yamna ancestry and without doubt was speaking a Late IE language. It's presence in Van make sense given the presence of Indo-European terms in Urartian language.

In conclusion the Urartian language is either affiliated to Sirnak BA, a region in the south either to Urmia, or more likely between them. Those places do have Khabur ware in MBA. Khabur ware is usually connected to Hurrian people.

This makes sense from linguistic point of view also. Because in Urartian language the word for enemy is lulu. A word without doubt derived from Lulubeans. Tribes living in Zagros. Urartians were hating so much Lulubeans that they coined the word enemy from them. Which means that their initial homeland was near Lulubeans.

While keeping in mind that we need more aDNA to make definitive conclusions, we can say that this data is in line with archaeology and linguistics. Which is a good news. At last we didn't wasted our time in long discussions in this group.

PS. There is also an outlier in Van. She has an obvious Etiunian origin. She was buried with a grave good. Her own bronze ring. Which means that she was a respected in her lifetime and almost certainly was not an enslaved person.

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