Urartu (Ararat)

Urartu was an ancient nation centred on Lake Van, in the Armenian Highlands. The Bible calls it Ararat, a name cognate with Urartu. In Akkadian it was called Uraštu, and its native name is given as Biainili. Gary Beckman is more cautious, saying only that among the Urartians the word "seems to have designated at least part of their territory".

Apart from an earlier mention of "Uruatri" in Assyrian sources of the 13th century BC, Urartu's recorded history begins when it appears in an inscription of Shalmaneser III. It rose to prominence in the ninth century BC, a confederation of small kingdoms that became the major rival of Assyria. From the ninth to the seventh century BC it vied with Assyria for control of northern Mesopotamia and Syria. The capital, first at Arzaškun, somewhere near Lake Urmia, was later moved to Tušpa on Lake Van's eastern shore, the fortress whose ruins are now known as Van Kalesi. The Pleiades gazetteer notes, however, that Tušpa's standing as the capital "remains uncertain". Urartian sites are spread across what are now Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Armenia. Gary Beckman reports that the kingdom's end is now generally dated to around 640 BC. The Zondervan Encyclopedia of the Bible instead dates it later, to a series of Median attacks in the early sixth century BC that ended its independence. The Encyclopaedia Judaica cites Herodotus for the Medes' occupation of its former lands by 585 BC. Beckman observes that for Western readers the best-known legacy of Urartu is its name, reshaped as Ararat, as in Mount Ararat.

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Ararat in the Bible

In Genesis the ark comes to rest "on the mountains of Ararat" (Genesis 8:4); where in this land it settled is taken up under Mountains of Ararat. Ararat is also the land to which Adrammelech and Sharezer escaped after killing their father Sennacherib while he worshiped in the temple of his god Nisroch (2 Kings 19:37; Isaiah 37:38). Ararat is named again, with Minni and Ashkenaz, among the kingdoms summoned against Babylon in Jeremiah's oracle (Jeremiah 51:24, 27, 29), a summons that also calls up "the kings of the Medes" (Jeremiah 51:28). The Zondervan Encyclopedia of the Bible takes Minni as the Maneans and Ashkenaz, probably, as the Scythians, and judges that the grouping of Ararat, Minni, Ashkenaz and the Medes "accords with the military situation" of the early sixth century BC.