Posted on 03/03/2006 8:19:01 AM PST by SunkenCiv
The Urartians established a kingdom around Lake Van in eastern Anatolia but failed to deal with severe winter conditions, especially snow, in an effective way, said Professor Veli Sevin on Wednesday, according to archaeological findings...
Urartu was an ancient kingdom in eastern Anatolia centered in the mountainous region around Lake Van that existed from about 1,000 B.C. until 585 B.C. It stretched from northern Mesopotamia through the southern Caucasus, including parts of present-day Armenia up to Lake Sevan.
The name Urartu is actually Assyrian, a dialect of Akkadian, and was given to the kingdom by its chief rivals to the south. It may have simply meant "mountain country." The capital city of the Urartu kingdom was Tuflpa, near Lake Van.
The Urartians, who had to adjust to harsh natural conditions, were successful in agriculture and animal husbandry.
Their temples and palaces, with multicolored reception halls, mark the contribution of Urartu to the history of architecture. Another important feature of Urartian art is their wall paintings, which combine bright-colored geometric and plant motifs with various animal scenes. Decorated bronze panels, belts, helmets, shields and cauldrons also held an important place in Urartian art.
(Excerpt) Read more at turkishdailynews.com.tr ...
If someone had invented the suv, these people might have survived.
ArmeniansContemporary scholarship suggests that the Armenians are descendants of various indigenous people who meld (10th through 7th century BC) with the Urarteans (Ararateans); while classical historians and geographers cite the tradition that the Armenians migrated into their homeland from Thrace and Phrygia (Herodotus, Strabo), or even Thessaly (Strabo). These views are not necessarily contradictory, since present-day Armenians are undoubtedly an amalgam of several peoples, autochthonous (Hayasa-Azzi, Nairi, Hurrians, etc.) and immigrant, who emerged as one linguistic family around 600 BC.
by Dennis R. Papazian
September 8, 1987
The Armenian language, like Greek and Iranian, is a part of the Indo-European family of languages that is spoken from north India, through Afghanistan, Iran, Armenia, and Greece into Europe and European Russia. The Armenian alphabet, devised early in the fifth century by St. Mesrob (Mashtotz)--who also produced a script for the Christian Georgians and Caucasian Albanians--is unique, although based in part on Greek uncials and the Armazi variety of Aramaic script. Armenia was located near the cradles of ancient civilizations--the Mesopotamian, bordering immediately to the south; the Egyptian in the southwest; and the Indus to the east--and was affected by each, but most significantly by Mesopotamian. The name "Urartu", in the form "Urashtu", occurs frequently in Babylonian inscriptions. The earliest known mention of the "Armenian" people (as the Armenoi), occurs in the writings of the Greek historian Hecataeus of Miletus (c. 550 BC), and of "Armenia" (Armina) in the Behistun [Bisitun] inscription of Darius I (c. 520 BC).
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From Tarsus to Mount Ararat...Lake Van is a large inland body of water of about 1400 square miles at an elevation of 5737 feet. The lake is fed by a number of rivers and is highly alkaline. It is said that folks sometimes wash their clothes in the lake. We drove along the south side of the lake where the elevation reaches 7324 feet at one point.
bt Ferrell Jenkins
May 2, 1996
In Assyrian records this area was called Urartu. In the Bible it is called Ararat. The English term Ararat is a transliteration of the Hebrew term. The four references where the term appears are Gen. 8:4, 2 Kings 19:37 = Isa. 37:38, and Jer. 51:27. The King James version uses the term Armenia in 2 Kings 19:37 and Isaiah 37:38 because that is what the territory was later called. The Septuagint uses Armenia only in Isaiah 37:38...
Paul Zimansky, in a recent article on Rusa II, the seventh century B.C. king of Urartu, describes the extent of the territory: "The kingdom that Rusa controlled in the second quarter of the seventh century BCE stretched across the mountainous terrain of eastern Anatolia approximately eight hundred miles from east to west and five hundred from north to south" ("An Urartian Ozymandias," Biblical Archaeologist, June, 1995, 94). Dr. Oktay Belli says the name Urartu is not an ethnic term but a geographical one meaning "mountainous terrain" (The Capital of Urartu: Van, 20). Prior to the Urartians, this region was the home of the Hurrians.
In Search of Hurrian UrkeshWe know that Urkesh was... a real city as well. In 1948, two bronze lions appeared on the antiquities market; the lions are inscribed with a text in which a king by the name of Tish-atal boasts of having built a temple in Urkesh. But since the provenance of these lions is not known, the location of the city until recently was also unknown... Our excavations, however, have proved that Urkesh was located at the remote north Syrian site of Tell Mozan.
by Giorgio Buccellati
and Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati
The New York Times
August 22, 1997
Gene From Mideast Ancestor May Link 4 Disparate Peoples
By NICHOLAS WADE
Several thousand years ago, somewhere in the Middle East, there lived a person who bequeathed a particular gene to many present-day descendants. But these millions of now distant relatives could not convincingly be called one big happy family. They include Jews, Arabs, Turks and Armenians.
The gene, a variant of a gene that controls fever, has come to light because it causes an unusual disease called familial Mediterranean fever in individuals who inherit a copy from both parents. The gene's presence among a surprising group of populations hints at the rich archeology that lies buried in the human genome, once geneticists and historians have learned how to interpret it.
Two rival teams of scientists in France and the United States have been racing to isolate the gene for a year. The race finished on Friday, with the American team announcing its finding in the journal Cell, the French team in Nature Genetics.
The American team has named the gene pyrin, from the Greek word for fire, after its role in fever; the French team calls it marenostrin after the Latin "Our Sea," a Roman phrase for the Mediterranean. The race could be considered a dead heat, although the American team has recovered the whole gene, the French team just a major portion.
People who inherit a single variant copy of the fever gene from one parent and a normal copy from the other parent have no sign of the disease. They are so numerous, constituting up to 20 percent of certain Jewish and Armenian populations, that carrying one copy is assumed to confer some significant benefit, like a greater resistance to disease.
In individuals with two copies, however, the immune system goes into overdrive at inappropriate moments, causing bouts of severe fever. The scientists who have analyzed the fever gene and its variants say they now understand why.
The normal gene specifies a protein that from its designmotifs looks as if it is meant to slip into the nucleus of the cell and switch genes on or off. Since the gene is active only in a special class of white blood cells, its usual duty seems to be to control the cells' activity and rein them in when the threat of infection has passed. The white blood cells defend against infections and often cause fever in doing so.
The new findings, in portraying the exact genetic anatomy of the normal gene and its variant forms, give a strong clue as to why the variant versions have the effects they do. The variant forms have mutations, or changes of a single DNA letter, in the region of the gene assigned to the switching function. Presumably the mutations make the gene's protein inefficient in its duty of restraining the white blood cells.
The historical significance of the finding lies in the genetic relationship it implies between populations that have been separate for many hundreds of years. For example, the variant form of the gene found in North African Jews, Iraqi Jews and Armenians is the same, carrying both the same mutation and a pattern of 11 other genetic changes, all harmless.
Although single genetic changes can arise independently, the presence of so many together in the same combination points strongly to a "founder" or single ancestor as the original source of the variant gene.
A second variant form of the gene, according to the American team, is shared by Iraqi Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, the Moslem Druze sect and Armenians. The two variants are similar and probably derive from the same founder.
The Americans write that the mutations are "very old" and that they suggest "common origins for several Middle Eastern populations."
Dr. Daniel Kastner, a member of the team, said the original possessor of the variant gene probably lived several thousand years ago and certainly less than 40,000 years ago, according to a formula that relates the average length of a shared genetic segment to the number of generations that have passed. Kastner said the founder's gene may have spread through a population in the Middle East that existed before Jews, Armenians and Arabs became distinct peoples.
He also noted that the variant fever gene established a common genetic lineage between Ashkenazi Jews and Iraqi Jews, even though the two communities have been separated since the Babylonian Captivity that began in 597 B.C. Many Jews from the ancient community in Iraq now live in Israel.
The French team has detected the main variant in Jews and Arabs from North Africa and in Turks and Armenians. Dr. Jean Weissenbach of the gene laboratory Genethon, a member of the French team, said that the variant gene was ancient but that an exact date of it origin could not be calculated.
Experts in Middle Eastern history and linguistics said they knew of no historical event to link the four populations in which the variant fever gene has been found, although three - Arabs, Jews and Armenians - are related geographically, having originated in the Middle East. The ancestral Armenian homeland is around Lake Van in Turkey. The Seljuk Turks invaded from Central Asia in the 11th century, and they absorbed many of the local inhabitants.
Familial Mediterranean fever is rare in the United States. Patients often endure years of misdiagnoses. Once the disease is recognized, an effective drug, colchicine, is available. Now that the DNA sequence of the variant gene is known, an accurate test can be made.
The American-led team includes scientists from laboratories in Israel and Australia. The French team is from Genethon in Evry and two other laboratories in France.
In inscriptions of the Assyrian King Shalmaneser I (1280-1261 B.C.) we find the first occurrence of the term Uruatri... eight countries, collectively referred to as Uruatri, situated in a mountainous region to the southeast of Lake Van... the Assyrian name of Uruatri had no ethnic significance... (perhaps meaning 'the mountainous country')... In Assyrian inscriptions of the 11th century B.C., we again find the term Uruatri, and from the second quarter of the 9th century, in the reign of Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 B.C.), it is of common occurrence, in the form Urartu, being used concurrently with the name of Nairi... (Boris B. Piotrovsky, Urartu pp 43-45)
In clothing and equipment the Urartians differed from the Assyrians and showed close affinities with the Hurrians and Hittites. An example of this is the crested helmet, which came into use in Assyria only in the mid-8th century B.C., having been taken over from the Urartians. (p 48) In the 9th century B.C. Urartian military equipment had been similar to that of the Hurrian tribes and quite different from that of the Assyrians; but by the reign of Argishti... Assyrian equipment... had become the regular wear of the Urartian army. Similarly the culture and the way of life of the ruling class of the Kingdom of Van were deeply imbued with Assyrian influence. (p 81)
carrying one copy is assumed to confer some significant benefit, like a greater resistance to disease.I guess we don't all need to review what "assume" means? ;')
Giving Goliath His Due:The name Goliath, like Achish, is not Semitic, but rather Anatolian (McCarter 1980, 291, Mitchell 1967, 415; Wainwright 1959, 79). Not all agree though; the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (2:524) proposes that Goliath may have been a remnant of one of the aboriginal groups of giants of Palestine who now were in the employ of the Philistines. [1. Naveh (1985, 9, 13 n. 14) states that Ikausu, the name of the king of Ekron in the seventh century b.c., is a non-Semitic name that can be associated with that of the Achish of Gath in David's time. The name in the seventh century has a shin ending that is non-West Semitic.]
New Archaeological Light on the Philistines
chapter 5 "David's Flight"
by Neal Bierling
foreword by Paul L. Maier
old edition at Amazon
Armenian shares major isoglosses with Greek, some linguists propose that the linguistic ancestors of the Armenians and Greeks were either identical or in a close contact relation.
Armenian and Phrygian show no close relationship with the Anatolian languages other than borrowings. The Anatolian loan words within Armenian indicate that proto-Armenians were in contact with both Luwian speakers and with Hittites.
The Classical Armenian language (often referred to as grabar, literally "written (language)") imported numerous words from Middle Iranian languages, primarily Parthian, and contains smaller inventories of borrowings from Greek, Syriac, Latin, and autochthonous languages such as Urartian. Middle Armenian (11th–15th centuries
From Wikpedia, I found this interesting, when I discovered it years ago.
I call b.s. on Mr. Veli Sevin. He notes the exceptional successes of these people in this area for hundreds of years. They were intelligent and resourceful and certainly found ways to adapt to the seasons.
Yeah, I tend to agree with that conclusion.
On a mission to explore deepest Lycia Where Greek language has left its mark
Ekathimerini (english edition) | Dec 30 2005 | Christina Kokkinia
Posted on 12/30/2005 2:40:22 PM EST by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1549447/posts
Lycian Influence To The Indian Cave Temples
The Guide to the Architecture of the Indian Subcontinent | spring of 2000 | Takeo Kamiya
Posted on 07/11/2005 10:37:19 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1440990/posts
Money talks: Ancient coins refute myths
The Times of India. | SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 02, 2003 01:34:12 AM | SHABNAM MINWALLA
Posted on 02/02/2003 7:14:29 PM EST by vannrox
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/834586/posts
Lasted 415 years. They must have done something right.
Funny the possibility wasn't offered that the climate changed suddenly, which caused a social collapse. I mean, it's nothing that hasn't happened in other places, such as Europe at the beginning of the Little Ice Age. :')
I have traced my family back to 1547, about the middle of the "Little Ice Age". There was a time when only 2 of 19 children lived long enough to carry on the family name. The family was living in the "Swabian Alb" part of Germany, and were farily well off (as I understand it). I could understand how an entire culture COULD disappear within a few generations. That could be especially true if they were prevented somehow from leaving a specific area.
I managed to trace my Family surname back to March 10, 1340 at what is the start of the Little Ice Age. The Pyrenees Area of SW France made out quite well during the Little Ice Age. The old Family Maison is still lived in by the Family.
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