Manuscripts

What They Left Behind

"It is impossible to have a culture this advanced with no written language"

Beyond stone carvings (called "pictograms", since they represented ideas through pictures, as opposed to an alphabet, which captures sounds and is used to create words and sentences to express ideas), there is very little to suggest what a native language was like in Armenia between the Paleolithic and Urartian periods.
Detailed maps showing ancient fortified towns and roads that exist to this day are scrawled on the sides of stone foundations, as are complex trigonometry and geometric formulas pointing to astral, solar and lunar phases. The inscriptions even include one of the first calendars and compasses ever created. The Metsamorians and their ancestors were the earliest known civilization to forge copper, bronze and iron, they created a pantheon of gods that foreshadow the Greek pantheon. Having one of the greatest cultures of the Bronze Age (the "Metsamor Kingdom"), Ancestral Armenians curiously left no written words behind.
Emma Khanzatian, director of excavations at Metsamor, and the Grande Dame of archeology in Armenia, does not find a missing language all that curious.
"It is impossible to have a culture this advanced with no written language," Ms. Khanzatian says. "Just impossible. They were among the leaders in the known world at that time in science, industry and trade. Metsamor era artifacts are found in Egypt, Syria, Persia, India and Central Asia. Their distinct black and geometric pottery made its way to Mycenae, they may even have created the wheel. They knew trigonometry, astronomy and geomtetry--you can have none of these sciences without notation, the forms of writing. How could they leave nothing in writing behind?"
Part of how is shown by several strata of excavations at Metsamor and other ancient cities. Black, charred earth, pottery and skeletons lie in heaps in several layers from the middle Bronze and early Iron Age. Sieges and burnt earth policy began far before recent memory. If anything like parchment was created along with spectacular bronze and gold objects uncovered at Metsamor, AdaBlur, Jerahovit and MokhraBlur, it was surely burned along with the population. More recent layers of excavation show continued sieges and burning in the common era, including a 4^th century layer that was a result of struggle between Pagan and Christian armies.
It is not until the Urartian period (ca. 1300-550 BC) that a written language has been found and that was borrowed from Sumerians and Assyrians. Stone was the preferred medium of expression, though there is some proof that wood and leather parchment were used along with clay tablets in Mesopotamia and Egypt. But other than signs of zodiac, maps and geometric equations, no signs of writing from the Metsamor period have been uncovered.
Khanzatian smiles and nods her head towards a central mound at Metsamor. "We haven’t begun to uncover what lies beneath this ground. And just think what must be under a city as old as Jerahovit or Aigeshat. Just because we haven’t found it doesn’t mean it isn’t there." A wizened face carved from years of excavating the windswept earth on the Ararat plain laughs and points to the central mound. "And somewhere under the main citadel lies a treasure as important as any gold artifact the archive."

The Indo-Europeans

"the Indo-European culture is now figured to be on or near the Armenian Plateau, with migrations into Asia and Europe beginning as early as 7,000 BC"

To appreciate just how great a treasure Ms. Khanzatian refers to, we should go back a few thousand years to the beginnings of culture on the Armenian plateau. We’re going back oh, about 9000 years, when the first settlements built around the copper industry appeared in the Ararat Valley. Now, while the oldest layer uncovered in any city the size of Metsamor is a mere 7000 years old, there are so many prehistoric settlements in Armenia to suggest civilization is very old indeed. These include the site of a one million BC skeleton in the Hrazdan Gorge and a 90,000 BC Stone Age settlement in Yerevan.
The Armenian language is part of the Indo-European language family. The name ‘Indo-European’ is itself a variation of ‘Indo-Aryan’, encompassing Sanskrit, Persian, Slavic, Germanic and Romance languages. The Indo-European language tree takes in more territory, speaking wise, than any other on earth.
One of the greatest evolutions in history occurred when Indo-Europeans began to migrate throughout Asia and Europe. Classical historians put this event sometime in the 3rd millennium BC and thought the source for Indo-Europeans were someplace in Central Asia. History is always being reinvented, though, in the face of new discoveries, and the source of the Indo-European culture is now figured to be on or near the Armenian Plateau, with migrations into Asia and Europe beginning as early as 7,000 BC. Moving first into Central Asia and India to the East, the Russian landmass in the North, and then through the Balkans into Europe, successive waves of Indo-Europeans culminated in a ca. 2000 BC migration into the Eastern Mediterranean which hallmarks the beginning of the Greek Doric culture. From there the culture made a full circle when the Hittites and later when Thraco-Phrygian tribes (among the losers of the Trojan War) entered the Armenian Plateau and re-introduced an altered Indo-European language back to its birthplace.

In one of the pictograms carved during the Mesolithic period there is a representation of a man with both arms raised, his legs slightly bent. The top half of the figure is considered the precursor of the letter for "Ah", the main root sound in all Indo-European languages, represented in Armenian by the letter "²". Speculation is that the first sound made was "ah", and came to represent "man", "first" and "one". The raised arms indicate worship. In Armenian, the sound ‘Ah’ combined with "R’ forms a second main root, "AR", which means ‘light;, ‘sun’ and ‘god’. Numerous words in Armenian begin with ‘AR’, among them arev (sun) and Ararat. Ararat is a complex word: ‘Ar-Ar’ meaning a greater god, or more than one god, and ‘-at’ a precursor of the Armenian ‘hat’, which means ‘a piece of’. Thus, ‘Ar-ar-at’ is ‘a piece of the gods’, or ‘a piece of creation’.

Others originating in the pictograms include ‘barev’, which in modern Armenian means ‘hello’, but comes from an older root meaning ‘to belong to’, represented in the pictograms as a dwelling or house.

Metsamor reached its zenith in the Mid Bronze Age, when it encompassed more than 200 hectares (about 800 acres). At the center of trade between Asia and the budding cultures in the West, the mineral mines and metal forges in the Metsamor kingdom were the focus of constant warfare with neighboring city-states, and by the end of the 3^rd millennium, with the growing empires in Mesopotamia. The Metsamor culture thrived through the Bronze and early Iron Age, when it was integrated into the Urartu Empire (ca. 7^th c. BC). The city of Metsamor continued under the Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines and Ottomans until the 18^th century, when it was abandoned. 6700 years of continuous inhabitation not a bad record.

The Second Wave

An equally sophisticated culture sprang up by Lake Van, in Anatolia. More closely located to the Mesopotamian cultures, the ancestral Armenian tribes in the Van region developed a series of city-states by the 3^rd millennium BC, with federations formed and reformed between them for most of the Bronze Age period. Excavations in the Van region are undeveloped, so that most of what we know about the really prehistoric epochs is that uncovered in the Republic, but it is thought that the Van Kingdom was equally, or even more developed than that in the Ararat Valley, since the territory was described as a rich land between the rivers, with their head at the "mountains of the gods" (described as "Arartu"). This description comes from the oldest epoch poem, Gilgamesh (ca. 5^th millennium BC). To earn that kind of praise, a land would have to be very rich indeed.

By the 2nd millennium BC, trading between the tribes on the Armenian plateau led to a loose federation led by the Nairi, which were based around Southern Lake Van. The Nairi were recorded as early as 2000 BC on Assyrian cuneiform as the people from the "land between the rivers," holding about 60 tribes and 100 cities. The Nairi were one tribe among many, but their name became synonymous with that for the entire region. Among the tribes in Nairi was one called Urartu. From what we know of the tribes, their customs and traditions were similar to others found in Mesopotamia, and they mixed Semitic or Ugaritic origins with their earlier Indo-European genetic and cultural roots.

Also around 2000 BC, a second wave of Indo-European migration began, this time coming full circle back to the Armenian plateau. Thousands of years of development created distinct dialects and physical attributes, which further influenced the "mother tribes" in Armenia. Among them were the Hittites, which entered the region of Asia Minor around 2000 BC. The Hittites mention a vassal kingdom of theirs called the Haiassa-Aza, which are considered one of the direct links with the Armenian culture. The Haiassa-Aza were Indo-European, had extensive contacts with the tribes of the Nairi, and it is believed that architectural and cultural influences from the Hittites were filtered into this region through them.

The immigrating Indo-European tribes brought with them forms of writing some say the "Hyksossian" script used in the Sinai between 1730-1580 BC comes from the same branch of ancestors as those who brought the "Haikasian" script to the Armenian plateau (ca. 1500 BC). But a quick look at the Evolution of the Armenian Script shows striking similarities between these ‘new’ scripts and those from the Metsamor period (ca. 5000 BC), which was established on the plateau at least 3000 years before then.

Another wave of Indo-Europeans entered the scene around the 12th c. BC, by a race called "the people of the sea". These are thought to be Thraco-Phrygians retreating from Mycenae and Thrace and Phrygia, probably survivors of the Trojan War, which occurred at the same time. First inhabiting the land immediately East of the Trojan kingdom in Asia Minor, the Thraco-Phrygians settled on the Western edges of the Armenian plateau and intermingled with the Haiassa-Aza, further developing Indo-European language, culture and physical features.