Urartian language

Encyclopedia : U : UR : URA : Urartian language

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

Urartian was an agglutinative language, which belongs to neither the Semitic nor the Indo-European families but to the Hurro-Urartian family. It survives in many inscriptions found in the area of the Urartu kingdom, written in the Assyrian cuneiform script. The Urartians also possessed a native hieroglyphic script, but in later Urartu this script was restricted to use in accounting and religion.

Based on linguistic similarities with Northeast Caucasian languages, some scholars place it and the closely related Hurrian language in the Alarodian family. There is also possibly a connection between Urartian and the modern Armenian language.

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.