Why They Wrote
 

 

 
"In the Metsamor kingdom, early script forms go back to around 2000 BC "

    When Sumeria perfected the wedge-shaped cuneiform around 3000 BC, it introduced an alphabet to the world, and the relatively quick and easy method of describing things (and oh how the Sumerians loved to describe things 80% of their clay tablets are lists of things) caught on with other countries.

While it influenced other attempts at writing, it did not usurp them. In the Metsamor kingdom, early script forms go back to around 2000 BC. The script uncovered in this period has moved away from simple iconography to symbols with complex meanings, and they appear in lines or groups the first sentences created by ancestral Armenians. The symbols are very far removed from Sumerian wedge shaped slashes on clay they function as a communication device while at the same time they are elegant pictures of divine presence on earth.

Accomplished astronomers a thousand years before the Sumerian Script, ancestral Armenians were steeped in a religious iconography revolving around the sun, the moon, the planets and the stars. A pantheon of gods inhabiting the constellations of the zodiac which experts believe had been completed ca. 2800 BC was "captured" in sacred script found at places of worship. By around 2000 BC, the "Metsamor Script" had been codified and was widely used in ancestral Armenian lands. Not so curiously, this script is found outside urban areas, and appears in remote areas of the country places where it is easy on a clear night to gaze at the stars and identify the home of the gods, to catch their moods and predict future events.

As a script reserved for religious purposes, writing and divining symbolic meanings were reserved for the priest classes and here is something scholars neglect to inform readers in their thesis’. The fact you can read this article at all is a miracle of the modern age. The vast majority of the population back then could never have deciphered their script, even if they had been allowed to read. They were illiterate.

Regardless of the intricacy, beauty or functionality of any old script from the majestic Egyptian Hieroglyphs to the compact Sumerian cuneiform, or the elaborate Chinese pictograms writing was reserved for the upper classes it was a weapon as strong as any sword in keeping the peasants passive. Literacy is a recent event in the concept of time it isn’t widespread in the "civilized" countries until the end of the 19th century, and is only now making inroads worldwide.

To a great extent, the picture quality of old scripts was kept even as a culture moved to more efficient ways of writing, simply to give the peasant class some clue as to what the authors were up to. While they could never have understood the intricacies of pluperfect or passive tenses, let alone the grave error of a dangling participle, they could spot a spiraling sun disc placed over the head of the king. They lived in pictures, studied them for spiritual meanings, and were comforted or terrorized by the interpretations made by the priests.

Writing was kept by the religious class, and passed on to only a select few. Sometimes the aristocracy could read, but there were more than a few kings who didn’t have a clue what their own priests were writing. I like to imagine the development of reading had a lot to do with keeping tabs on what the scribes and priests were up to, as much as it did with impressing the locals with erudite learning. By the time Urartu rose, second sons were routinely assigned positions of High Priest, keeping the family business of running an empire close at home. Wouldn’t want anyone changing the archives just when we are about to enter eternal god-status, now would we?

By the time Urartu rose in prominence in the region, they had developed a dual system of writing. Visitors to Urartian excavations like Erebuni learn that Urartu used cuneiform, and that it was borrowed from Assyrian script.

For a while this caused classical scholars to surmise that Urartu was little more than a regional power that absorbed a more refined Assyrian culture as they rose to power. And it seems to fit: A mountainous tribe captures most of Anatolia and then looks up from the dust to find a glorious culture to the South. To read some scholars, the ensuing wholesale "invasion" of Assyrian architecture, design and religious iconography reads like a country cousin rampaging through Rodeo Drive on credit. ("Like that Babylonian bull effigy, Marj? We’ll take fifteen hundred for the temple. Oh, and throw in a few hundred lapis lazuli snake charms for the mid-winter banquet."). Oh, those classical scholars.

Thankfully, new information has come to light showing there was as much influence on Assyria by the Urartians as vice versa. While the Assyrians seem to have taken Sumerian and Babylonian worship of animal-gods and sent them north to Urartu, the entire Assyrian astronomical tradition can be traced to the much earlier Metsamor period. Almost identical designs used in Assyrian frescoes and carvings have their earliest representations in the Armenian plateau.

As for script, the Urartians placed cuneiform in public places, designed to assert authority over anyone who could read it which would have been one of several thousand Assyrian prisoners taken in battle. The educated prisoners understood the meaning of the use of "their" script: A power had risen in the North to rival their own, great enough to absorb the culture of the South. Most depressing of all, it was great enough to change it to a more refined style. Frescoes uncovered in Assyrian palaces and throne rooms from the period show whole scale adoption of Urartian symbols and designs.

For the other, illiterate prisoners, it was a blow against myths that Urartu was nothing more than a bunch of mountain tribes. Not only did they copy the sacred Assyrian script, they flung it in the face of their enemies.

And Urartians used a second script along with cuneiform. This script seems to be reserved for more prosaic uses, though symbols appear along with cuneiform in temple and palace areas. The Urartian script is a much-developed version of the Metsamor Script, though it still relies on pictures to communicate ideas. Rival Haikasian script had begun the conversion of pictures into more abstract symbols. Whether either were used like alphabets to capture sounds that are strung together to make words no one who wasn’t around at that time really knows.

During the Urartian period (ca. 1200-650 BC), other scripts were used in ancestral Armenia, among them the Armavir (1100 BC) and the Cholagerd (850-750 BC) scripts.

Neither script has been found to include more than a few symbols, and none have been deciphered adequately to tell whether they were actual words, pictures of events, or geographical map symbols. They seem at first glance to be holdovers of the earliest pictogram tradition in the area, and since they were used by remote tribes, they might represent a sort of local dialect.


    A Continuous Line of Letters


"Almost immediately following the collapse of Urartu, the tribes in the Armenian plateau reorganized into a new kingdom, the Armen or Arameh"
    Urartu ended abruptly ca. 585 BC after the Medes--assisted by Scythians-- invaded and destroyed the capital of Tushpa. With it the use of cuneiform also died.

Almost immediately following the collapse of Urartu, the tribes in the Armenian plateau reorganized into a new kingdom, the Armen or Arameh. That is, old Greek records began calling them that, and their kingdom "Arminya". To the new Persian Empire, they were the "Ehrmeneh". Some debate is made about how the Armen tribe, thought to be a separate ethnic group of Hurrian or Hattian origin to the West of Urartu, could so quickly usurp the Urartian empire. Considering the close ties between all the tribes in the Armenian plateau, and their cultural intermingling, it is more than possible the Armenians and the Urartians were more likely cousins than distinct ethnic groups. What is known is that the transfer of power did not cause any serious eruption in the nation: language, religion and traditions continued as they had under the previous kingdom.

A few years later the Assyrian Empire was crushed by the Achaemenids, which formed the first Persian Empire under Xerxes and Darius. These are the folks who invaded Greece and triggered the rise of the Athenian League. Armenians were there in the thick of fighting, on the Persian side.

    What’s in a Name?

 

"The first mention of the people on the Armenian plateau is in the earliest story we know of, the Sumerian epic poem Gilgamesh
(5th millennium BC)"

Part of the confusion of tracing origins of written language is complicated in Armenia by those racing

to discover the exact roots of the current culture. For some this is a fanatical search for the moment the Armenian nation began. The problem with this search is it is too limiting in its scope, and ignores thousands of years of history in trying to find a "first moment". And, truth be told, history is very messy and rarely lends itself to the arbitrary divisions of time.

The first mention of the people on the Armenian plateau is in the earliest story we know of, the Sumerian epic poem Gilgamesh (5th millennium BC). In the poem there is mention of a land called ‘Arata’, where visitors had to ‘go by mountain, return by river’. The first written records to mention the inhabitants of Armenia come from hieroglyphs of the Hittite Kingdom, inscribed from 1388 to 1347 BC. The earliest inscription to be found directly upon Armenian lands, carved in 1114 BC by the Assyrians, describes coalition of kings of the central Armenian region referring to them as ‘the people of Nairi’.

Other cultures called the same country Haiassa-Aza, Armenuh, Uruatri, Urartu, Ararta, Alarod, Ararat or Ehrmeneh. What is consistent between these names is their essential meanings: all names contain a variant of the words representing ‘god’, ‘river’ and ‘mountains’. The sound "Ar" represented the sun, which was the greatest deity. Ararat was called by Sumerians "the mountains where the gods live". Assyrians and Babylonians used "Nairi" which meant "the land between the rivers". Haiassa-Aza is much later, divided into Hai-asa-aza, or "land or people of the Hai(k)", incorporating a Hurrian or Hittite "H" sound.

So we have different languages describing the same country, which in itself was inhabited by many tribes, each giving themselves their own names, and if they rose to the status of being recognized by outsiders, the entire country was thus named. Among the tribes in the Armenian plateau were the Haiassa, the Armen and the Urartian. As they intermingled (we’re talking thousands of years here), they shared their culture, and language dialects, and by the 3rd millennium BC, there is a considerable likeness between tribes on the entire plateau.

postcards from armenia