Urartian language kept alive by Turkish site guardian

Mehmet Kusman, 86, has spent decades at the Cavustepe fortress in eastern Turkey copying and learning Urartian inscriptions, even as academics say no one can now claim to speak the ancient written language.

Kusman was hired as a labourer on Cavustepe excavations after his military service in the 1960s. He told AFP that being discouraged from learning the difficult cuneiform script pushed him to keep studying it.

He said he mastered the alphabet in three years but needed 22 years to learn 650 words of vocabulary. He has become a local figure at Cavustepe and calls himself “one of the last seven people in Turkey to speak the Urartian language.”

Erkan Konyar, a professor of ancient history at Istanbul University, said Urartu was one of the strongest states of the ancient Near East between the 9th and 7th centuries BC. He said Kusman had spent 60 years among the excavations and introduced thousands of visitors to Urartian history.

But Konyar said historians do not really know how Urartian was pronounced and that only some words are known with certainty. “So no one can claim to speak Urartian,” he said.

Mehmet Isikli, director of the Department of Near Eastern Archaeology at Ataturk University in Erzurum, also said Urartian was a written language rather than a spoken one. He praised Kusman’s role in drawing attention to Urartian culture, while saying his work was not academic.

Isikli is excavating Ayanis, a major fortress north of Van. He said the site may offer clues about the end of Urartu, including traces of what he described as a powerful earthquake.