Talk:Urartu

Khaldian people

Chaldia /Khaldian people: Were they the people of Urartu that went to the Northern parts of Anatolia? Scholars such as Carl Friedrich Lehmann-Haupt (1910) believed that the people of Urartu called themselves Khaldini after their god Khaldi. Böri (talk) 07:29, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

sure, it's a possibility, nobody will ever know because they didn't leave behind written sources. Such is prehistory. --dab (𒁳) 11:54, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

Start and end dates of Urartu

It seems two slightly different sets of dates for the start and end of this kingdom are being used here: 860-590 as seen in the infobox, but also the dates 858 and 585 are referred to, and these agree with the articles for the first and last kings. My educated guess would be that 858 and 585 pinpoint the exact years when the first king started and the last king stopped, whereas the dates "860" and "590" seem to derive from somebody "rounding off to the nearest zero". If this is the case, it would be better to be consistent and to use the exact years these events fall in, viz. 858 and 585, in the infoboxes and articles. Cheers, Til Eulenspiegel /talk/ 23:01, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

The dates of the timelines preceding the 9th century, without any attestations, are cruelly speculative! HJJHolm (talk) 14:45, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

Urartu is to Armenians what ancient Britons are to the English, and Gauls are to the French

This doesn't sound like an objective and scientific encyclopedia worth sentence. What if reality is more like "Uratu is to Armenians what 19th century Palestinians to Israeli" ? Also English learned to respect Britons after murdering most of them (safe for Welsh). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.180.50.39 (talk) 17:44, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

Uratu/Ararat Religious POV

The removed section contained the weasel word "scholars" which linked to a creationist website. This is dishonest, as it presents the views of religious fundamentalists as if they were scholarly consensus. It is not generally acknowledged that Uratu is the Biblical Ararat. Paul S (talk) 00:26, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

The section should be reinstated in some form, because it is indeed a significant point of view that Urartu is identifiable with the Ararat mentioned in Jeremiah, and actually I don't know of anyone who disagrees that Ararat, being geographically within Urartu, is cognate with that name. Do you know of any sources that contend otherwise? Til Eulenspiegel /talk/ 01:56, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

The Wikipedia article on Ararat cites an alternative Armenian derivation (how reliable?) and some older sources suggest Hebrew ’arar or yarad (but how reliable again?) but don't ask me to prove a negative. By all means cite any source for Ararat = Uratu, but we can't have a Creationist website cited on the basis of it being "scholars". Paul S (talk) 11:34, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Still looking... there are endless websites blindly restating the equation of Ararat with Uratu because of the mountain, without any explanation of how it was the specifically Hebrew form of Uratu would be one to survive in Classical Armenian... Paul S (talk) 16:46, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Sounds like you're finding as I said, that there is general agreement that Ararat was in Urartu, and that the names are indeed considered cognate by scholars. And this is relevant to this article. If you still personally disagree (despite the fact that evidently not one scholar has ever located Ararat anywhere else but in Urartu) then your inability to "prove a negative" as you put it certainly does fail the burden of proof being on you, for lack of any source that shares your disagreement. Til Eulenspiegel /talk/ 16:55, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

By the way I notice that you consistently (four times out of four) spelled it URATU in this talk section (without the second R). I just hope you're not spelling it that way in your web searches, because you will probably get more hits if you include the second R. Til Eulenspiegel /talk/ 17:00, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

You're right! I never even noticed that I'd done that! Paul S (talk) 20:46, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

I wouldn't exactly call it agreement... searching the web turns up two sorts of things - articles about the Biblical Flood or Armenian nationalists and their detractors. The former all blindly accept the equivalence with Ararat with no explanation of how Assyrian Urartu and Babylonian Urashtu would yield Hebrew Ararat but Afro-Asiatic is much less my bag than Indo-European. I'm still trying to find someone from a purely archaeological and/or linguistic perspective with an explanation of how and why. Paul S (talk) 20:58, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

I see that even Isaac Asimov wrote that Ararat "was a mountainous kingdom where the Tigris and Euphrates had their sources in what is now eastern Turkey. It flourished in Assyrian times, and its name was Urartu - of which Ararat is clearly a version." And the Armenian sources seem to be written by experts in Armenian history. There is no cause to discount them for drawing the same, apparently uncontested conclusion. Til Eulenspiegel /talk/ 21:28, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Isaac Asimov not noted for his work in the field of Semitic linguists... all I want is a source explaining how Urartu/Urashtu corresponds to Ararat; all we can find is a load of people saying, "Everyone knows that" with absolutely no explanation of how we all know it. Paul S (talk) 12:24, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

I had no problem finding lots of sources stating Urartu=Ararat that cannot be brushed off as "Fundamentalist Christian" and "Armenian Nationalist", whatever your problem is. This includes: the Cambridge History, the Encyclopedia of Islam, the Jewish Encyclopedia, and every other source to talk about either. If those in Semitic languages assert that Urartu is the Akkadian form of Ararat, and none disagree, this is getting to the point of being ridiculous. I am familiar with Semitic languages and have no problem seeing how Ararat would become Urartu in Assyrian pronunciation, it may easily be observed that all nouns including countries end in -u, and I can aver many other vowels in Assyrian coalesce with "u", eg in shumelu, "left hand" for just one example. Til Eulenspiegel /talk/ 15:21, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Cite a few of those and I suppose it's a consensus. I remain a little disturbed by the fact that there is no good reason to make the association but everyone does it "because". Paul S (talk) 00:17, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

Urart - translation from assyrian

Hi, I just want to say that assyrians (people) until now call armenians "hurart" in their language. Is there some ideas to explain it?Emil.nkr (talk) 10:53, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

Organization of Armenian ethnogenesis Section.

Currently, this section is confusing to understand. It is not clear which theory a sentence is being referenced to. I believe this is very important in order for a first time reader, like myself, to understand the material. I suggest it be partitioned further by theory (Kurgan, Anatolian, Armenian, Herodotus). For example, the third sentence: "The presence of a Proto-Armenian population in the area already during Urartian rule is subject to speculation: It is generally assumed that Proto-Armenian speakers entered Anatolia from around 1200 BC, ultimately deriving from a Paleo-Balkans context, and over the following centuries spread east to the Armenian Highland.[46][47][48]" The very first sentence has already mentioned another theory, even before the first is mentioned! I had to read the entire section repeatedly, to understand what was being said. And I still don't know exactly which sentences and paragraphs correspond to which theory. I would very much like to see this section cleaned up and broken down further into it's corresponding theory. This will help clean up the section and provide clarity.Razdukhavod (talk) 16:41, 26 February 2013 (UTC)