Since we have got on to Dilkaya Höyük, it is time to ask the obvious question: who made all this? Who were these people?
The museum label answers: the Kura-Araxes culture—named after the river Kura and its tributary the Araxes—also known as the Early Transcaucasian culture. This Bronze Age culture spread, between roughly 4000 and 2000 BC, across an enormous territory from the Mediterranean to the Caspian: the very ground on which Assyria, Urartu and Greater Armenia would later appear, and which is today divided between Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Iran, several North Caucasian republics of Russia, Syria and Türkiye. (Archaeologists, incidentally, consider the Kura-Araxes culture extremely close to another one found further west, in the North Caucasus: the Maykop culture.)
Everybody’s ancestors
Naturally, nationally engaged historiographers—one might fairly say nationalistically engaged—all pull at this unfortunate ancient culture from their own corner.
Armenian sources not infrequently present the Kura-Araxes culture as “East Armenian.” Turkish ones will now and then stress its Anatolian origins. Russian ones prefer to call it simply Transcaucasian, so as not to quarrel with anybody—everyone was splendid, everyone took part. Proponents of the “Aryan homeland” theory in Iran remind us, with a slight smile, that it all began at Marageh. And the Georgians, from the elevation of their Shulaveri-Shomu culture (6000–4000 BC), cannot understand what all the fuss is about.
Even the pots have several passports
The best joke in the whole business is that the disagreement reaches down to the naming of the objects themselves.
When Kura-Araxes people moved south in the third millennium BC and settled in the Levant, they took their distinctive burnished red-and-black pottery with them. Excavators there, working in a different country under a different scholarly tradition, named those pots after the site where they first turned up: Khirbet Kerak ware. Identical technology, identical people, and for a long time two separate entries in the literature, because the pots had crossed a border that would not exist for another four thousand years.
A cradle, not a flag
Modern archaeological and genetic evidence indicates that the Kura-Araxes culture was neither a state nor a people, but a way of life, propagated through a network of settlements, through trade and through marriage. People lived, ploughed, shaped pots and figurines, built houses, exchanged things with one another.
So one can certainly argue about who came first and whose ancestor he was. Or one can simply admit that the inhabitants of this region shared a cradle, in which they grew up at a time when it had not yet occurred to anybody to draw imaginary lines and sort everyone into us and them.
