Armenia, Travels and Studies (Volume 2 of 2) / The Turkish Provinces

by H. F. B. Lynch

Fig. 123. Van from the Slopes of Mount Varag.

By what people were they inscribed, these regular lines of elegant characters; and who were the kings who sojourned upon this delightful platform, which seems to have been raised by a freak of Nature in the midst of the plain with its westerly extremity almost reaching into the lake? Armenians, Persians, Arabs, Seljuks, Tartars, Turkomans, Turks—all have come and passed or stayed, and none have been able to return an answer to the question invited by the writings on the citadel. They have had recourse to the resources of Oriental legend, or have been content with the explanation that these inscriptions are talismans, sealing treasures long since buried in the heart of the rock. The fame of the place is widely spread over all the surrounding country, forming as it does the kernel of a populous city on the confines of Armenia and Kurdistan. It has been described by the national historian of the Armenians in terms which in many respects portray the existing features in a singularly faithful manner. Moses of Khorene attributes the works to an Assyrian queen Semiramis, and relates on the authority of Mar Abas Katina and from Chaldæan sources the story of her fruitless passion for the reigning king of Armenia, Ara, and of the death of that monarch while resisting her endeavours to obtain his person by force. The queen is said to have accompanied her armies to the northern kingdom, and to have founded the city as a summer residence for her luxurious court. The tale is beset by incidents which reveal its fabulous nature; and the historian informs us that several such legends relating to Semiramis were current among his own countrymen.[17] At the same time he deplores the lack of culture among his ancestors, to which he ascribes the absence of native annals.[18]

It has been reserved for our own age to penetrate the mystery, which, indeed, is only now as I write being dispelled. Quite early in the nineteenth century, while the future excavators of the Assyrian cities were either unborn or were still in their nurseries, a young French student, Jean Antoine Saint Martin, the son of a tradesman in Paris, was fired by the account of the inscriptions at Van contained in the pages of Moses of Khorene.[19] Mainly through his efforts the French Government—always solicitous of the interests of culture—were induced to despatch a mission to Armenia in 1827, engaging the services of a young German professor, Friedrich Eduard Schulz. The first report of the explorer was published by Saint Martin in 1828.[20] By a piece of misfortune, happily rare in the annals of travel in these countries, Schulz was murdered by the Kurds in 1829. But his papers were recovered and brought to Paris, where they seem to have awaited in obscurity the awakening of interest in Oriental antiquities which was consequent upon the discoveries of Burnouf, of Lassen, and of Rawlinson. An instructive memoir, together with copies of forty-two inscriptions at Van and in the neighbourhood, appeared under his name in 1840 in the pages of the Journal Asiatique. Schulz’s copies have been found to be in the main remarkably accurate, although he had not the smallest knowledge of the language in which they were composed. Little by little the contents of the tablets in a similar character which are spread over Persia yielded up the secrets which they had so long maintained; and the excavations in Mesopotamia furnished Orientalists with the necessary material to enable them to understand the languages of the cuneiform inscriptions furnished in such profusion by the buried cities of the plains. But with the exception of the great tablet in three columns and as many tongues which is such a conspicuous object on the southern face of the rock of Van (Schulz, Nos. IX., X., and XI.), and an inscription on a stone in the remains of a wall at its base (Schulz, No. I.), none of the Vannic records agreed with the syllabaries already discovered, or could be translated into any known language. Schulz had indeed perceived that the first of these monuments contained the names and titles of Xerxes, son of Darius; and when Layard visited Van and took new copies in 1850, it had come to be recognised that this tablet of Xerxes resembled other Achæmenian inscriptions, and was very nearly word for word the same as those of this Persian monarch at Hamadan and Persepolis.[21] The characters upon the stone in the wall were exactly the same as those of Assyrian writings; and, although the inscription had not been satisfactorily deciphered when Layard’s book was published, that investigator was able to discern that the language also was Assyrian, while that of all the remainder, in spite of the similarity in character, was peculiar to Van, and baffled decipherment. In the meanwhile other equally perplexing inscriptions had been discovered in districts of the tableland remote from the city of Semiramis; and a partially successful endeavour had been made by the English Orientalist Hincks to read the mysterious texts.[22] But the problem remained unsolved for very many years, while the stock of inscriptions collected by travellers in various parts of Armenia was continually increasing. A great step forward was made by the discovery by M. Stanislas Guyard, announced in 1880,[23] that the phrase at the conclusion of many of the Vannic texts represented the imprecatory formula found in the same place in their Assyrian and Achæmenian counterparts; and this enabled Professor Sayce of Oxford to proceed rapidly with their decipherment, upon which he had been engaged for some years.[24] Mainly as the result of his labours we are now enabled to gather their meaning, and to add a new language and a new people to the museum of the ancient Oriental world. Since he has written, the number of known Vannic texts has been doubled by the German scholars and travellers, Professor Lehmann and Dr. Belck. They have also, in a series of most instructive articles, called up the vanished civilisation from the grave.[25]

We now know who built Van and by whom these tablets were engraved upon the face of the citadel. As the horizon opens with each advance in our acquisition of the vocabulary and with each addition to the catalogues of texts, we are introduced to no obscure dynasty which slept secure behind the mountains, but to a splendid monarchy which for at least two centuries rivalled the claims of Assyria to the dominion of the ancient world. The native designation of the imperial people was that of Khaldians or children of Khaldis, just as the Assyrians reflect the name of their god, Assur. The constitution of the State was that of a theocracy in which Khaldis occupied the supreme place. The company of the remaining deities were spoken of as his ministers, and the whole land appears to have borne his name.[26] It was the wrath of Khaldis that was invoked against whosoever should destroy the tablets; and with him were coupled in a kind of Trinity the god of the air and the sun-god. The seat of Khaldis was the city of Dhuspas, the modern Van; and all conquests were made by the king in his name. Dhuspas was the capital of the territory of Biaina, from which the king derived his title. We can readily trace through literature the corruption of the word Biaina into the existing form, Van; it figures in the shape of Buana in the writings of Ptolemy and in that of Iban as late as Cedrenus.[27] In the course of time it had come to be applied to the city; while the name of the city was transferred to the province in which it was placed, and became the Dosp or Tosp of Armenian writers.[28] The contemporaries and rivals of the Vannic monarchs, the rulers of Assyria, styled the northern kingdom Urardhu or Urarthu; and this is the same name that appears in the Bible in the familiar form of Ararat. They make no mention of the local appellation of Biaina; although it seems possible that the district called Bitanu or Bitani in the Assyrian inscriptions may be connected with the latter name.[29] On the other hand there can be little doubt that the Turuspa of the Assyrian annals is the Dhuspas of the monuments of Van.

The Khaldians take their place in this new chapter of history at least as early as the latter half of the ninth century before Christ. Their language was neither Semitic nor Indo-European; and it is therefore impossible to connect them either with the Assyrians, who were Semites, or with the Armenians, who belong to the Indo-European family. They ruled over the tableland which is now Armenia before the Armenians had appeared upon the scene; and it was the movement of races with which was connected the Armenian immigration that seems ultimately to have occasioned their dispersal and the overthrow of their power. Their dominion appears to have been due in no small degree to the happy choice of Van as their capital. Assyrian history ranges beyond the probable date of that foundation, to a period when Urardhu was perhaps an obscure province in the neighbourhood of the modern Rowanduz in Kurdistan. The Assyrian armies in their marches northwards were opposed by a confederacy of petty princes whose country is called Nairi in the Assyrian inscriptions. That loose term evidently embraced a considerable portion of the Armenian tableland; for it was in the plain of Melazkert that the Assyrian king, Tiglath-Pileser I. (c. 1100 B.C.),[30] overthrew the united forces of the kings of Nairi and erected a memorial tablet which has been preserved to the present day.[31] In a restricted sense the name Nairi was applied by the Assyrians to the province about the middle and upper course of the Great Zab; and the lakes of Van and Urmi, between which that territory was situated, were both known as the Upper seas or seas of the land of Nairi, Lake Van being sometimes distinguished as the Upper sea of the West, and Lake Urmi as the Eastern or even as the Lower sea.[32] The kingdom of Urardhu is for the first time mentioned by the Assyrians in the reign of Ashur-nasir-pal (885–860 B.C.); but it is not before the ensuing reign of Shalmaneser II. (860–825 B.C.) that we have certain evidence of an Assyrian army marching into Armenia to attack the territories not of a league of Nairi princes but of a monarch of Urardhu. This prince, of whom no records have been discovered in Armenia, is called Arame. His capital, of which the site is at present unknown, but which certainly lay to the north of Lake Van, bears the name of Arzasku. Arame was signally defeated in 857 or 856 B.C. and abandoned his capital. His cities as far as the sources of the Euphrates (Murad?) were taken by Shalmaneser in 845 or 844 B.C. When next we hear of a king of Urardhu we are able to recognise in his name the earliest of the rulers who appear in the Vannic texts. And this monarch, Sarduris the First, the contemporary of the same Shalmaneser and his antagonist about 833 B.C., was the founder of the fortress of Van.

No better position for a stronghold against a Power operating from the lowlands in the south could have been discovered by the builders of an empire on the Armenian plains. In the later phases of the history of Armenia the movements of empires and peoples have generally proceeded between the east and the west. Against such currents the city of Van composes a minor obstacle, which they avoid on their more normal and northerly course. Always secure with a fleet on the lake and the passes of Mount Varag fortified, the true military value of the place only advances into first-rate importance when the centres of the hostile forces lie in Mesopotamia. It is screened in that direction by perhaps the most impenetrable section of the entire outer or Iranian arc of the peripheral mountains which support the tableland.[33] Moreover, the circumstance that the arc has snapped and sent out a splinter into the districts on the north, represented by the mountains in which the Great Zab has its source, and, further north, by the elevated but not impassable waterparting between the basin of Lake Van and that of the Araxes, has had the effect of concealing Van within the fork of a twofold parapet where it reposes with its back against the complex barrier and defies attack from the south or south-east. The approach from the west along the southern shore of the lake is interrupted by the spurs of the great range; and the Assyrian armies were compelled to make the détour by the plain of Melazkert, gaining the plateau by one of the passes north of Diarbekr and leaving it upon their return home through one of the passages east of Rowanduz where the sea of mountains settles down to a regular course. Such an immense circuit through a hostile country necessitated resources on a vast scale, the existence of which among the Assyrians fills the mind with admiration when we contemplate the squalor of the Oriental empires of the present day. But there can be no doubt that all the advantages lay on the side of their northern adversaries, to whom was offered a reasonable chance of annihilating their hosts, or, in the event of defeat, the secure alternative of shutting themselves up in their capital and there awaiting the passing over of the storm. These considerations serve to explain the comparative immunity and the rapid development of the empire of the successors of Sarduris the First; at a time, too, when Assyria was governed by such warlike monarchs as Shamshi-Ramman and Ramman-nirari.[34] It was reserved for Tiglath-Pileser the Third to beard the lion in his den, and to appear before the walls of Van. But even this gigantic figure failed to capture the citadel, although he appears to have destroyed the garden town at its feet (735 B.C.).[35] The ultimate effects of his campaign may be measured by the fact that the inveterate and sometimes successful adversary of Sargon (722–705 B.C.) was the Vannic king Rusas the First. And the northern empire is still a force with which the Assyrians have to reckon as late as Ashur-bani-pal, the Sardanapalus of the Greeks (668–626 B.C.).

Fig. 124. Bronze Shield from Toprak Kala (British Museum).

Fig. 125. Bronze Fragment from Toprak Kala (British Museum).