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Urartu, Archaeology of

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Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology

Introduction

Urartu was an Iron Age kingdom that flourished between the ninth and the seventh centuries BCE in the northern regions of the Ancient Near East, stretching across portions of the modern nations of Turkey, Armenia, Iran, and a small part of northeastern Iraq (Dan 2010).

Celebrated as one of Assyria’s uttermost rivals (and for a time the most powerful state in the Ancient Near East), this political entity has been the object of numerous studies in the past 15 decades (Piotrovsky 1969; Barnett 1982; Lindsay and Smith 2006). Over this time, the Urartian material culture assemblage has proven to be very characteristic and distinguishable within the archaeological record in the Ancient Near East (Zimansky 1995a). This entry provides a general historical overview of the Kingdom of Urartu while focusing on the development of Urartian studies and Urartian archaeology as well as on Urartian material cultural assemblage.

Definition

Urartu, Bianili, and Nairi

The name Urartu (which is...

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Correspondence to Juan Christian Rodriguez Bobadilla .

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Rodriguez Bobadilla, J.C. (2019). Urartu, Archaeology of. In: Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51726-1_2345-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51726-1_2345-2

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