So far as our knowledge at present extends we may regard Sarduris the First as the initiator of a remarkable and far-reaching revolution among the peoples of the tableland. The title which this monarch bears, that of king of Nairi, as compared with that of his successors, kings of Biaina,[36] connects him with the earlier period of the confederacy of Nairi princes which his dynasty under the ægis of the god Khaldis was destined to supplant. His son, Ispuinis, and his grandson Menuas at once extended the empire and added to the works upon the citadel of Van; and the latter was the principal author of that magnificent canal which to the present day under the fanciful name of Shamiram-Su, or river of Semiramis, conducts the waters of the Khoshab to the suburbs of Van.[37] Menuas may, therefore, be considered as the founder of the garden town; although at that time it is probable that it was situated south of the citadel rather than, as is now the case, at some distance to the east.[38] During the reign of the successor of Menuas, Argistis the First, the Vannic dynasty reached the zenith of its power. The kinglets of the valley of the Araxes had been dispossessed of their fertile territories, and the great city which was afterwards known as Armavir rose from the banks of the river in honour of the god of Van. The whole extent of the Armenian tableland, such as it is described in the present work, with the possible exception of some of the most northerly districts, was subject to the rulers residing on the shore of the great lake; and their inscriptions recording conquests are found as far east as the province south of Lake Urmi and as far west as the Euphrates near Malatia. In that direction they came in contact with the Hittites; while their neighbours on the east were none other than the Minni of Scripture, residing in the more southerly portion of the Urmi basin and the adjacent districts.[39] The inscriptions on the rock of Van enumerate the feats of arms of Argistis the First and Sarduris the Second. No records have yet been found further north than Lake Gökcheh, Kanlija, near Alexandropol, and Hasan Kala, near Erzerum. South of their capital the wild districts of Shatakh, Norduz and Mukus have been scoured by travellers in quest of such monuments, but hitherto without result.
Fig. 126. Ornament from Toprak Kala (British Museum).
With one exception no systematic excavations have yet been made upon any of the sites of the cities and strongholds of the Vannic kings. When these shall have been undertaken we may expect to have drawn an impressive picture of the attainments of their people in the arts. The single instance of such efforts—and it is not one of which we need be proud[40]—has been directed to the low limestone hills which overlook the gardens of Van upon the north, and which in their neighbourhood bear the name of Toprak Kala. In or about the years 1879 and 1880 operations were conducted upon this eminence under the direction, as I have gathered, of Captain Clayton, then our consul at Van, and of Mr. Hormuzd Rassam.[41] Tunnels were opened into that part of the site which disclosed the buried remains of an ancient settlement, and which was found to have been covered with buildings composed for the most part of sun-dried bricks. The most important result of the enterprise was the laying bare of a temple, still containing quite a number of bronze shields with cuneiform inscriptions, embossed and chased with ornamental designs and the figures of animals. Some of these may be seen in the British Museum and others in the Museum at Berlin. They represent votive offerings on the part of the kings, and were suspended upon the walls in the manner shown by an existing bas-relief from the palace of Sargon at Khorsabad. Indeed that sculpture portrays the destruction by the Assyrians of the temple of Khaldis in the city of Mutsatsir, not very far from the present town of Rowanduz. The dimensions of the edifice were small, only 69 feet by 44 feet, measured at the foundations. But the walls were built of great blocks of hewn stone, and traces of a pavement in a kind of mosaic were found. The doors appear to have been of bronze. Outside the entrance stood a block of marble which was hollowed out and was probably used for sacrifices. At the time of my visit little was to be seen of this interesting structure, for the vandal townspeople had removed its masonry for building purposes. Large faced blocks, taken thence and perhaps from other edifices, were being rolled down the hillside. Only a fraction of the objects found was brought away by Messrs. Clayton and Rassam; their workmen abstracted the remainder, from whose hands some portions have filtered into Europe. Toprak Kala has quite recently (1898) been the scene of further excavations, this time on the part of Messrs. Belck and Lehmann. They have dug out the substructures of the temple to its foundations, cleared away the rubbish which obstructed a long subterraneous passage, debouching into a large chamber which may have served as a reservoir, and which was fed by an artificial duct deriving its water from a neighbouring spring; and discovered a wine-cellar containing colossal vats, some engraved with Vannic writing and one with a Persian cuneiform inscription. We also owe to their labours the discovery not far from the temple of a space which seems to have been set apart to receive the bones of the sacrificial animals and of the human beings, captives of war, who had been offered up to the god. They have acquired numerous objects, of silver as well as of bronze and iron, including weapons and ornaments of various kinds. But the principal service which they have rendered is the identification of Toprak Kala with the city of Rusas mentioned in the stele near Keshish Göl on the slopes of Mount Varag. The inscription on that monument, if rightly deciphered, leaves little doubt that King Rusas, probably the first of that name, made use of that little lake as a partly natural and partly artificial reservoir, and conducted its waters along the foot of the Toprak Kala heights to the region occupied by the present site of the garden town. The earliest ruler mentioned on the shields is Rusas the Second; while we know from their contents that the temple was built or restored by Rusas the Third in honour of the god Khaldis. All the indications favour the assumption that in consequence of the depredations of Tiglath-Pileser the Third some change was made in the disposition of the city. The heights of Toprak Kala seem in some degree to have usurped the importance of the citadel, and to have been used as defences for the extension of the gardens in that direction.[42]
The culture of the Vannic kingdom was perhaps borrowed from the Assyrians and was certainly derived from the Mesopotamian plains. The legend of the passion of the queen of Assyria, the consort of the eponymous hero Ninus, for an Armenian king who suffers death at her hands and is restored to life,[43] contains, so far as it expresses the intercourse of the pre-Armenian peoples, a considerable kernel of truth. Ara and Semiramis are none other than Tammuz and Istar, the Adonis and the Aphrodite of the Hellenic myth; and the advent from Assyria of the voluptuous queen in quest of a beautiful but reluctant lover may be connected with the introduction from abroad of the worship of Istar.[44] However this may be, it is certain that the earliest inscriptions found at Van are in the Assyrian language and character; while those of the successors of Sarduris the First, although composed in the Vannic tongue, show but slight deviations from the cuneiform writing as practised at Nineveh. There is evidence to show that long after the disappearance of the empire of the Khaldians Assyrian influences lingered on in the land. I shall have occasion to remark these traces in the study of the architecture of the church at Akhtamar; and they compose a factor which should never be quite absent from the mind when examining the masterpieces of Armenian mediæval art. The Vannic dynasty are not the symbol of resistance on the part of rude mountaineers to the approach of civilisation moving up from its immemorial seats. Far rather do they represent the beneficent spread of arts and letters over the Armenian plains. The favourite sites of their cities are not the recesses of the mountains of the tableland, but some small eminence from a wide extent of level and fertile ground, as typically embodied by the rock of Van and the mound of Armavir. They are builders of canals to irrigate the land, of roads to traverse even the scarcely passable ridges of the peripheral region, of bridges to span the great rivers. If we are still in the dark with respect to their ethnic affinities, we need harbour no doubts upon the character of the civilisation which they contributed to diffuse.
Like Adonis they have been carried down the stream of time, and over them the eddy has long since closed. The spade of the archæologist reveals the charred remains of their later stronghold on the heights of Toprak Kala overlooking the gardens of Van. But by what people and at what date were they stricken to the ground, and their temples and palaces given to the flames? It is the disadvantage of a history which is derived from inscriptions, that issues as well as origins must remain obscure. I am not aware that any certain answer can be given to the first part of the question, and the date of the supreme catastrophe which must have overtaken the city can only be approximately fixed. The Vannic records differ in one important respect from those of Assyria; they do not contain a single date. The chronology is therefore dependent upon the mention in them of an Assyrian monarch or by the Assyrians of a contemporary ruler of Urardhu. The latest inscriptions hitherto discovered belonging to the northern kingdom are those of Rusas the Third, the son of Erimenas, who lived in the time of Ashur-bani-pal. But a successor of this prince is mentioned in the Assyrian annals as having sent an embassy to Nineveh about 644 B.C. His name is the familiar one of Sarduris, and he takes his place as the third king of that name. It would appear likely that at the time of his embassy he had only just begun to reign; and we should probably be justified in protracting the span covered by the Vannic dynasty at least as late as the death of Ashur-bani-pal (c. 626 B.C.). This date brings us down to the dawn of Oriental history as contained in the works of Greek writers. In the pages of Herodotus the Armenian tableland as well as Assyria form portions of the great empire of Darius (521–486 B.C.) and Xerxes (485–465 B.C.), which had succeeded the loose rule of the Scythians. And this new era has left behind it one of the most impressive of the monuments upon the rock of Van. On its southern face, in full view of the walled town at its base, is inscribed the trilingual record of the Persian conquest. “A great god is Ormazd, who is the greatest of gods, who has created this earth, who has created that heaven, who has created mankind, who has given happiness to man, who has made Xerxes king, sole king of many kings, sole lord of many. I am Xerxes the great king, the king of kings, the king of the provinces with many languages, the king of this great earth far and near, son of king Darius the Achæmenian. Says Xerxes the king: Darius the king, my father, did many works through the protection of Ormazd, and on this hill he commanded to make his tablet and an image; yet an inscription he did not make. Afterwards I ordered this inscription to be written. May Ormazd, along with all the gods, protect me and my kingdom and my work.[45]
Years before this noble pronouncement was engraved in its imperishable arrowheads the empire of Assyria had come to an end. Nineveh was laid desolate in 606 B.C. by her Babylonian subjects assisted by the hordes of the Scythian king.[46] Within a very brief period of the history of these countries ethnic changes on a vast scale had taken place. New nations had appeared upon the scene. The Cimmerian nomads, followed closely by the wild tribes of Scythia, had penetrated southwards from the countries on the north of Caucasus and swarmed over the settled lands. Ancient kingdoms tottered and fell into the human surge. It is just at this period that we come to hear of the Armenians. All the evidence points to the conclusion that they entered their historical seats from the west,[47] as a branch of a considerable immigration of Indo-European peoples crossing the straits from Europe into Asia Minor and perhaps originally coming from homes in the steppes north of the Black Sea. Just as their kinsmen, invading Europe, drove the old races before them, such as the Etruscans, the Ligurians, and the Basques, so the Armenians seem to have filled the void which may have been created by the ravages of the Scythians and to have supplanted the subjects of the old Khaldian dynasty in the possession of the plains of the tableland.
That this revolution was not accomplished until at least as late as the fifth century before Christ may be gathered from the pages of Herodotus. The Armenians are known to this father of historians as inhabiting the mountainous country about the sources of the Halys and those of the Tigris, extending round towards the Mediterranean in the neighbourhood of Cilicia, their boundary on this side being the Euphrates.[48] On the other hand the Khaldians or Urardhians have not already disappeared, although they have obviously declined to a subordinate position. They are mentioned under the name of Alarodians,[49] and they are joined with the Matienians and Saspeires or Sapeires in the eighteenth satrapy of the Persian empire.[50] Herodotus leaves us in the dark as to the exact localities in which they lived, although he indicates that the seats of the Saspeires lay to the south of the Kolchians, who inhabited the southern shore of the Black Sea in the neighbourhood of the Phasis.[51] He informs us that Alarodians and Saspeires were both armed like the Kolchians, and the fact that the satrapies were organised with a view to ethnic affinities suggests the possibility that the two names first mentioned had come to be applied to one and the same race. Other considerations seem to point in the same direction. Down to a comparatively recent period we find a people called Chaldians (as written in the Greek character) or Chaldæans occupying the mountains between Trebizond and Batum. There can be little doubt that they represented the remnants of the Vannic people, and they were almost certainly the same as the Alarodians of Herodotus and probably the same as the Saspeires, who have perhaps left their name to the present town of Ispir.[52] When the Armenians had expelled the ancient inhabitants from the settled country we know from a most interesting chapter in the Cyropædeia of Xenophon that the latter took refuge in the mountains. They fortified inaccessible peaks and lived by plunder, raiding down upon the plains.[53] Our knowledge of the geography may at this point assist our historical investigations; and we may be reasonably sure that we shall find the relics of the dispossessed Khaldians inhabiting the fastnesses of the peripheral ranges which border Armenia upon the north and south.
That this was the case in the northern region is proved by the long survival of the name Chaldia (= Khaldia) among those inhospitable heights. Professor Lehmann has collected with a thoroughness of which his countrymen alone seem capable, a catalogue of passages in Greek and Byzantine writers making mention either of the Chaldian people or of the province to which they gave their name.[54] That people are sometimes called Chaldæans in classical authors. But that this was an error seems sufficiently proved by the name of the province—Chaldia; by the survival side by side of the variant form—Chaldians, and by the practice of Armenian writers to distinguish between the name of the tribe on their northern frontiers and that of the Chaldæans. Chaldia with the capital Trebizond formed one of the military themes of the Byzantine empire; and I should like to add yet another reference to the lists of Professor Lehmann, this one taken from the travels of the Castilian ambassador, Don Ruy Gonzalez Clavigo, in the year 1404. Setting out from Trebizond on his way to Erzinjan, we find him travelling on the third day out through the snowy mountains of the province of Chaldia to the castle of Tzanich which stood on a crag; and on the morrow, in the evening, he arrives at the castle of the duke of Chaldia, where all caravans pay toll. The territory formed a part of the empire of the Grand Comneni; and the name has survived to the present day as that of a diocese of the Greek Church with the capital Gümüshkhaneh on the road from Trebizond to Baiburt.[55]
It is not so easy to trace the remnants of this ancient people in the southern zone of mountains. Their presence there is attested by the march of Xenophon with the relics of the Ten Thousand. A body of Chaldæan or, more properly, of Chaldian mercenaries oppose his passage of the Bohtan branch of the Tigris.[56] They are described as of independent spirit and warlike nature, and, like the Karduchi, the modern Kurds, as still maintaining their political freedom. One is tempted to enquire whether the present so-called Chaldæan or Assyrian Christians, who are spread about the districts in the neighbourhood of Julamerik watered by the Great Zab, may not supply the necessary and missing link. But here we approach a thorny and difficult question, upon which the limitations of the present enquiry forbid us to touch.[57] It will be better capable of discussion when some unanimity shall have been attained upon the origin and ethnic affinities of the subjects of the old Vannic kings. The Chaldæan Christians are reputed to have fled into the mountains from Mesopotamia as late as the era of Timur. Baghdad and then Mosul would seem to have been the earlier seats of their patriarchate. The name Chaldæan is not one which they apply to themselves, although they believe in their “Assyrian” origin. There is held by some scholars to be the widest etymological and original difference between the name of the people who were called after the god Khaldis and that of the Babylonian Chaldees or Chaldæans. But the question of a possible racial or cultural link between them cannot at present be regarded as already negatived.[58]