We continue along the rooms of the Van Museum. Next in line is the turn of the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages, 1300–900 BC: a period when the old traditions are still alive but new forms and new meanings are appearing. We are on a border between epochs, in archaeology and in aesthetics alike.
Here (⬆️ on the cover image) is a rhyton with an animal’s head and an ornamented back, terracotta, from that same period. The animal-shaped rhyton stays popular in this region right through into Urartian times—it may well go back to still earlier local traditions. Here it acquires new details and a recognisable plasticity of expression.
Beside it, a two-handled terracotta vessel with an ibex in relief. The same ibex we have already met, scratched into andesite in the post about the Trişin petroglyphs. Now he has been modelled onto a pot—the same unmistakable silhouette, but in volume, in a different material, in a new cultural context.
And finally, earrings of bronze and glass, found at Karagündüz Höyük. Glass is uncommon in archaeological levels of this period here; these were most probably imports, or local work in imported material.
Eighty in one grave
Karagündüz is worth a paragraph of its own. It stands not on Lake Van but on the eastern shore of Lake Erçek, the smaller lake just east of the city, and it was dug between 1992 and 1999 by Veli Sevin together with the Van Museum. The mound holds seven occupation levels, running from Kura-Araxes times all the way to the Middle Ages.
But the extraordinary part is the cemetery. The tombs are stone chambers approached by a passage, and they are not individual graves: each held between twenty and eighty skeletons. These are family vaults, opened again and again over generations, with the dead added to the company already inside.
Not yet Urartu, or already?
The culture of the Van basin at this date belongs to no age of palaces, as in western Asia Minor, and has not yet reached the political centralisation of Urartu. We see scattered but sturdy farming and herding communities, which left behind a strikingly expressive material culture. The principal sites are the Early Iron Age cemeteries of the basin: Ernis, Dilkaya, Yoncatepe and Karagündüz, where these objects were found.
And here the excavator of Karagündüz makes a claim worth pausing over. Sevin argued from precisely this material that there is no cultural break between the Early Iron Age and the Urartian kingdom: the pottery, the burial architecture and the grave goods run continuously into what comes next. The Urartians did not arrive. They were already here, herding sheep between the highland pastures, and over the course of roughly a millennium they settled down, fortified their hills and acquired a state.
So these are not the people who came before Urartu. They are the same people, at a stage before the name.
And the name, when it came, came from outside. “Urartu” is what the Assyrian scribes wrote; the people themselves called their country Biainili. Which is the more durable word of the two: Assyria’s label went into the textbooks, but the self-description is still on the road signs, worn down over three thousand years into a single syllable—Van.
