Urartian language

Urartian is the name for the language spoken by the people of the ancient kingdom of Urartu in northeast Anatolia (present-day Turkey), in the region of Lake Van.

Urartian was a language isolate, which was neither Semitic nor Indo-European, but a member of the Hurro-Urartian family.

There is a hypothesis that suggests that besides the cuneiform inscriptions of the Urartian language, Urartu had a native hieroglyphic writing system. Armenian scientist Artak Movsisyan published a partial attempt deciphering of Urartian hieroglyphs, saying that they were written in an early form of Armenian.

Related pages
Urartu

 More reading 
C. B. F. Walker: section Cuneiform in Reading the Past. Published by British Museum Press, 1996, .
J. Friedrich: Urartäisch, in Handbuch der Orientalistik I, ii, 1-2, pp. 31–53. Leiden, 1969.
Gernot Wilhelm: Urartian, in R. Woodard (ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World’s Ancient Languages. Cambridge, 2004.
Mirjo Salvini: Geschichte und Kultur der Urartäer. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt, 1995.

 Other websites 
Urartian hieroglyphs hypothesis

Category:Urartu