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New Urartian Inscribed Stones at Anzaf

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

P. Hulin
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Extract

Anzaf lies approximately north-east of the modern town of Van, and rather less than ten miles from it by road; it is just off, and south-east of, the main road which leads from Van to Erçek and beyond in the direction of the modern frontier between Turkey and Iran and of the high mountains west of Khoi. Three published Urartian inscriptions, all of Menua, are described as having come from Anzaf; and there are, in the neighbourhood of the village, remains of two anciently walled places; one is on an eminence (from which Lake Erçek is visible) above, and close to, the village, which it conceals from the main road; the other is on the other side of the main road, about a mile distant from the village on the way to Van.

Type
Research Article
Information
Anatolian Studies , Volume 10 , December 1960 , pp. 205 - 207
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute at Ankara 1960

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References

1 Marked Angaf on the quarter-inch map GSGS 3919, sheet J38H, 2nd edition, 1942.

2 HChI. 46, 55a, 72.

3 Described and sketch-planned by Burney, C. A., AS. VII (1957), 38, 40, 44–5Google Scholar, with photographs of parts of them ibid. Pl. IV (b) and (a), under the names Upper Anzaf Kale and Lower Anzaf Kale; and again with measured plans in the present volume, pp. 178–180.

4 By Mr. C. A. Burney, who also kindly conveyed to the writer the report of the discovery of the circular stone by the villager who claimed to have found it.

5 The writer thanks the Turkish central and local authorities and the authorities of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara for helping him to make the journey which included this visit to Anzaf, the Trustees of the Arnold Historical Essay Fund of the University of Oxford and the Council of the British Academy for helping to meet his expenses in making it, and Mr. E. W. F. Tomlin for practical help in the course of the visit.

6 Perhaps, originally, not differing at all—see note 9 below.

7 HChI. 46.

8 The rulings cut above, between, and below the lines of the inscriptions are omitted in the copies.

9 This collocation of É and su-si-e is unexampled elsewhere in known Urartian texts; and the otherwise almost identical text from Anzaf at Tiflis (HChI. 46) has, like a stone from Malazgirt (HChI. 47) whose inscription includes the wording of these two Anzaf texts, the better intelligible i-ni su-si-e, “this shrine”. The vertical wedges of É can be seen to be cut deep into the stone, as if perhaps to obliterate something previously incised; and close inspection of an enlarged photograph shows a slight depression at the lower right of the first vertical where the middle horizontal of i would have begun, a similar slight depression at the lower right of the third vertical where the lower horizontal of ni would have begun, traces of what may have been the verticals of ni before and after the fourth vertical, and marks to the right of the fourth vertical which may be traces of the right-hand parts of the horizontals of ni. These indications suggest that the stone may originally have borne i-ni, altered afterwards to É for a reason not clear to the present writer.

10 AS. VIII (1958), 244, n. 26Google Scholar.