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: Urartaisch, 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 Urartaer. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt, 1995.
Other websites
Urartian hieroglyphs hypothesis
Urartu