The Restoration of Ancient History – Part 11
The Restoration of Ancient History is a paper delivered in November 1994 by Gunnar Heinsohn, Professor Emeritus at the University of Bremen in Germany, at a symposium in Portland, Oregon. This paper questions the conventional chronology of ancient history and offers in its place a radical reconstruction—the so-called Short Chronology, of which Heinsohn is the principal architect. In this series of articles, we are taking a closer look at the evidence cited in this paper in favour of Heinsohn’s new chronology.
In an earlier article, we examined Heinsohn’s theory that the ancient kingdoms of Mitanni and Media were one and the same, and that this kingdom flourished in the 7th and 6th centuries BCE. This identity had much to recommend it:
Mitanni and Media were both ruled by an Indo-Aryan aristocracy, which was ethnically and linguistically distinct from the subject population.
Only one of the two, Media, is mentioned by the Classical historians. Only one of the two, Mitanni, has left any significant archaeological remains in Mesopotamia.
The stratigraphic record seems to support the identity. The archaeological remains of Mitanni are found precisely where the archaeologists expected to find the remains of the Medes.
There are, however, a number of serious problems with Heinsohn’s hypothesis:
All the indications are that Mitanni lay somewhere in Upper Mesopotamia, to the west of the Zagros Mountains, while Media was located somewhere in northwestern Persia, to the east of the Zagros.
The identity of Wassukanni, the capital of Mitanni, and Ecbatana, the capital of Media, is beset by similar difficulties. Not only are the names quite different, but like the kingdoms of which they were the capitals, they appear to have lain on opposite sides of the Zagros Mountains.
In this article, we are going to take a closer look at an alternative theory that identifies Mitanni with the Kingdom of Urartu in what is now Armenia, and regards Media as a distinct entity in northwestern Persia. This theory has been proposed by at least two independent researchers.
According to Herodotus, the 18th Satrapy of the Persian Empire was shared by the Alarodians (Urartians) and two other nations: the Matienians and the Saspires (Godley 123, The Histories 3:94). Could the Matienians be the same as the Mitannians? This is actually considered a possibility by some mainstream scholars, even though Mitanni is thought to have disappeared some 700 years before the rise of Persia (Orr 1396). And what of the Saspires? Might they have been a Scythian tribe? Some scholars think so (Kurkjian 58). Note that Media was the 10th Satrapy and lay on the other side of the Zagros Mountains (Herodotus 3:92). It was quite distinct from the 18th Satrapy.
One independent researcher, Roger Waite, has suggested that the kingdoms of Mitanni and Urartu were one and the same, while Media was an entirely distinct polity:
Perhaps the most important piece of evidence, in finding a candidate for the land of Mitanni, is to be found in its language. The language of Mitanni was called Hurrian.
Some examples of the language were found in Boghazkoy and a few examples have been found in Syria. The majority of text in the Hurrian language is found in the letters of Tushratta of Mitanni to Amenhotep III and Akhenaten. Hurrian is not a member of the Indo-European group of languages. It is quite distinct.
There is only one similar language known to historians—Urartian! It is often written that Urartian is a descendent of Hurrian, but a detailed analysis of Hurrian and Urartian showed that there was unlikely to be a long period of time between them. Igor Diakonov studied the two languages, looking at the phonology, the system of sounds, and at the morphology, the way words were formed. In some ways, Hurrian was more advanced than Urartian, but in other ways, Urartian was more advanced. He concluded that they were different dialects of the same language …
The evidence from language points towards the identification of Urartu as being the land of Mitanni. There is no other country in the first millennium BC, which spoke Hurrian. The Medes spoke an Indo-European language, as did the Indo-Aryans …
The evidence of language points to Urartu as the country, which the Hittites called Mitanni. The name Mitanni, in the slightly different form of Matieni, was still applied to the inhabitants of Urartu in the fifth century BC, when they were part of the Persian Empire. The Assyrians also knew the name and applied it to the area around the city of Araziki, later called Arzashkun, which was in Urartu. The Mitannians were renowned for their skill in horse-training, a skill perfected by the Urartians …
If Mitanni were Urartu and came to prominence in the 800s and 700s BC, the progress of Indo-Aryan influence is straightforward. Indo-Aryans and their culture spread westwards from India, through Afghanistan to Iran in the tenth and ninth centuries BC.
Urartu, bordering on Iran, was also affected, incorporating some of the Indo-Aryan gods into its own pantheon and using some Indo-Aryan names and words. Whatever the origins of Indo-Aryan civilisation, the deletion of Mitanni from the second millennium greatly simplifies the problem …
Biaini was the name the Urartians used for their country. The name Urartu, used today by historians, was the name of the country used in Assyrian texts.
Argishti’s expansion of Urartian interests brought him into conflict with Assyria, and the Assyrian texts mention campaigns against Urartu in 781, 780, 779, 777 and 775 BC, but there is only one record of an Assyrian victory. Argishti’s records talk only of success and it seems that in general Assyria was unable to prevent the expansion of Urartian power, particularly in Northern Syria, where several states became Urartian vassals. Urartu now controlled the routes to the Mediterranean coast, which gave it access to sea-borne trade. Urartian items have been found in Phrygia and as far west as Greece and Italy…
According to Hittite history, Mitanni dominated Hatti and Northern Syria for half a century following the death of Telepinus, whom we have dated to the end of the ninth century BC. Urartu dominated Hatti and Northern Syria for fifty years, from the end of the ninth century. The history of Mitanni coincides with the history of Urartu … (Waite 1283-1284)
Waite further believes that he has found the Mitannian capital city of Wassukanni:
In 667 BC, [the Hittite Emperor] Suppiluliumas sacked the Mitannian capital city, Wassukanni. Archaeologists have never discovered this important ancient centre of Hurrian culture. Many attempts to locate it have been made but without success. In our reconstruction of ancient Hittite history, the time when Wassukanni flourished has been moved from the second millennium to the first half of the seventh century BC. Before the time of Suppiluliumas, Hittite references to Mitanni do not name the capital, so we can only state that the name of the city was Wassukanni during the period, which starts with the reign of Suppiluliumas, i.e. from 671 BC onwards.
We have already argued that Mitanni was actually the land of Urartu, and therefore Wassukanni had to be the capital of Urartu, but there is no doubt that the capital of Urartu was called Tushpa! This name is mentioned many times, both in Urartian and Assyrian inscriptions. How can this difference of names be explained?
In 667 BC, when Suppiluliumas sacked Wassukanni, Rusa II was king of Urartu. He had already reigned for several years, being mentioned by Esarhaddon in 673 BC. His father, Argishti II had started an extension of the capital on the hill of Toprakkale. This was completed by Rusa and he named his new residence Rusakina, the city of Rusa. The name Tushpa was retained for the old city, but the new development became the home of the Kings of Urartu. Rusakina remained the residence of the kings of Urartu for about a century, to the demise of Urartian independence.
We have previously noted that the Hittite syllable wa can be equivalent to the letter r and therefore Wassu was probably pronounced as ursu, which is the same as the way the Assyrians wrote the name of Rusa. There is a similar example in the treaty between Hattusilis III and Rameses II, which has extant copies in both Hittite and Egyptian. The Egyptian version of the royal name of Rameses begins with User, which in the Hittite version of the treaty is written Wassa.
Further search for the Mitannian capital Wassukanni will be fruitless. The famous city has already been excavated. The remains of Wassukanni are on the hill of Toprakkale, by the modern city of Van in Eastern Turkey. The site was first excavated in 1879 and has been regularly excavated since that date. Many examples of Urartian art in the museums of the world come from the site of ancient Rusakina. The throne unearthed at Toprakkale had features which are also found in Hittite art.
Wassukanni was Rusakina. Despite the similarities of the names, this conclusion has never been considered by historians. How could they! Rusakina did not exist until the first half of the seventh century BC, seven hundred years, supposedly, after Suppiluliumas sacked Wassukanni. (Waite 1306)
I find this a much more convincing identification than the claim by Heinsohn and Emmet Sweeney that Wassukanni was the same as Ecbatana. The Mitannian and Urartian names are very similar, and Rusakina lies in Upper Mesopotamia—the very place where one would expect to find Wassukanni.
Another independent scholar, P J Crowe, whose chronology of the so-called Hittite Empire is similar to that of Waite and is based on the theories of Barry Curnock, has come to similar conclusions concerning Wassukanni:
Suppiluliumas I. 671-c644 When Thudkhaliyas died his son Mugallu chose the throne name Suppiluliumas. His fragmentary ‘Deeds’ survive, written by his son Mursilis II. In Assyria, when Esarhaddon died in 669 BC, his son Ashurbanipal became king, and another son, Shamash-shuma-ukin, became king of Babylonia. They both always called Suppiluliumas ‘Mugallu’, king of Tabal, and his son Mursilis is referred to as ‘son of Mugallu’. The ‘Deeds’ record his campaign against Wassukanni, the Mitannian capital, c667. Tushratta, the king of Mitanni, chose to abandon his capital rather than give battle, withdrawing to the mountains as an earlier king Aram(e) had done in similar circumstances some 170 years before when attacked by Shalmaneser III. The Mitanni capital which the Hittites called ‘Wassukanni’ was the Urartian capital ‘Rusakina’, on the hill at Toprakkale. (Crowe 11-12)
Several cases of history apparently repeating itself arise when we examine the histories of Mitanni and Urartu side by side.
Mitanni had two capitals: Taite and Wassukanni.
Urartu had two capitals: Tushpa and Rusakina
The locations of Tushpa and Rusakina are well known—they both lie on or close to the eastern shore of Lake Van in Armenia—and both sites have been excavated. The locations of Taite and Wassukanni, however, are still unknown, though a number of sites in northern Syria have been suggested.
The Middle-Assyrian Emperor Adad-Nirari I attacked Mitanni and sacked Taite (Luckenbill 27).
The Neo-Assyrian Emperor Adad-Nirari II attacked Urartu (Luckenbill 110-111). But did he sack Tushpa?
Both of these kings are associated with a resurgence of Assyrian power:
In Adad-nirâri I (ca. 1300 B.C.) we come upon an ambitious and able ruler. Under him the Assyrian state made its first great strides toward becoming a world power. (Luckenbill 27)
Adad-Nirari II is recognized as the first of the Neo-Assyrian Emperors.
There was also an Adad-Nirari III—probably the one depicted in the stele above—but he is not known to have campaigned in Urartu.
Urartu was also known as Nairi.
Mitanni was also known as Naharin.
The Kingdom of Mitanni is referred to as Naharin in Egyptian texts during the 18th and 19th Dynasties (Breasted 1906, passim). Could this be the same as Nairi, an old name for Urartu? According to James Henry Breasted, Naharin means the Land of the Rivers:
... the Pharaoh reached Naharin, or the land of the “rivers,” as the name signifies, which was the designation of the country from the Orontes to the Euphrates and beyond, merging into Asia Minor. (Breasted 1905:263)
According to Archibald Henry Sayce, Nairi also means Riverland:
The very existence of the Vannic kingdom was unknown and unsuspected before the decipherment of the cuneiform texts. There are references to it in the Assyrian annals ... the most important of which is Sargon’s history of his campaign against Musasir, first published and translated by Thureau-Dangin ... but the greater part of our information is derived from the native monuments. These begin with inscriptions in the Assyrian language belonging to Sarduris son of Lutipris, and recording the construction of the citadel of Van with stones from the city of Alniun. He calls himself ‘king of the world’ and ‘king of kings,’ as well as ‘king of Nairi,’ the name under which the ‘Riverland’ of the north was known to the Assyrians, and we must accordingly see in him the founder of Van and the Vannic empire. (Sayce 173)
Mitanni was famed for its horses and the horsemanship of its people.
Urartu was famed for its horses and the horsemanship of its people.
As Roger Waite noted, both the Mitannians and the Urartians were renowned for their skill in horse-training. One of the few surviving texts of Mitannian origin is a “Hittite” treatise on horse training by a master of the trade called Kikkuli:
The so-called “Kikkuli Text” was discovered in the first campaign 1906–07 of the Boğazköy/Ḫattuša excavation in Anatolia (Turkey; see Fig. 1) led by the Assyriologist Hugo Winckler (1863–1913), and is named after its author, Kikkuli the “horse trainer from the land of Mittani”, as he introduces himself in the first line of the first tablet of his training instructions. (Raulwing 2)
Urartu too was famed for its horses:
Armenia (ancient Nairi and Urartu) was a key horse-breeding region from the second millennium onwards. Hittite and Assyrian rulers expended much time and effort to secure a supply of horses from Urartu, whether by trade or force. (Willekes 212)
In an earlier article in this series, we saw that the Mitannians left virtually no native records behind them. Almost all that we know of this people and their history we have learnt from their neighbours, such as the Assyrians:
Some time after 1500 the kingdom of Mitanni (or Mittani) arose near the sources of the Khābūr River in Mesopotamia. Since no record or inscription of their kings has been unearthed, little is known about the development and history of the Mitanni kingdom before King Tushratta. (Encyclopaedia Britannica Online)
No native sources for the history of Mitanni have been found so far. The account is mainly based on Assyrian, Hittite, and Egyptian sources, as well as inscriptions from nearby places in Syria. (Wikipedia)
But the Urartians have left substantial records of their history. To date, the most extensive collection of Urartian inscriptions is Mirjo Salvini’s Corpus dei testi urartei, which runs to five volumes. These are currently being placed online at the Electronic Corpus of Urartian Texts (eCUT) Project by the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Could these be the missing records of Mitanni?
If the Kingdoms of Mitanni and Urartu were one and the same, we would expect the list of the rulers of Mitanni to resemble that of the rulers of Urartu. But things may not be that simple. The rulers of Mitanni were Sanskrit-speaking Indo-Aryans, while the local population were Hurrian-speaking. It is possible that the rulers had both Sanskrit and Hurrian titles. Furthermore, there is still no consensus on the number of rulers of either kingdom or of the order of their succession.
The Urartian rulers are known from their own inscriptions and from Neo-Assyrian records:
In total, eleven Urartian rulers are known by [their] own inscriptions. Most of them are also mentioned in Assyrian sources. Two Urartian rulers, namely Aramu and Melarṭua [son of Rusa I], are only referred to by their Assyrian contemporaries. In addition, three individuals are attested in Urartian sources for whom it remains unclear whether they ruled as king or not ...
Regarding the royal sequence, the most important information in Urartian texts is the patronymic which frequently followed the name of the ruler. The respective phrase is usually translated as “x, son of y.” However, we must keep in mind that this formula does not necessarily refer to biological paternity. Since in Urartian the relationship between the two persons is expressed by the suffix -he- to form an adjective of appurtenance, the formula might also refer to legal paternity established by adoption or even another form of descent. Patronymics are also of great importance for distinguishing between rulers of the same name. In some cases, however, the royal sequence remains ambiguous. This is the case with rulers who have not composed their own inscriptions but are only referred to in filiation formulae, or in the inscriptions of other rulers. This group includes Erimena, who was mentioned only by his successor Rusa, Sarduri, son of Rusa, and Sarduri, son of Sarduri.
(Birgit Christiansen)
The order of the first seven rulers is thought to be fairly secure, though it remains unclear whether Arame and Lutipri were Kings of Urartu:
| King of Urartu | Conventional Reign |
|---|---|
| Arame | 858-844 |
| Lutipri | 844-834 |
| Sarduri I | 834-828 |
| Ishpuini | 828-810 |
| Menua | 810-786 |
| Argishti I | 786-764 |
| Sarduri II | 764-735 |
Sayce believes that Sarduri I founded a new dynasty, subjugating a previous local ruler of Nairi called Arame, and that Sarduri’s father Lutipri was never actually king:
... the greater part of our information [on Urartu] is derived from the native monuments. These begin with inscriptions in the Assyrian language belonging to Sarduris son of Lutipris, and recording the construction of the citadel of Van with stones from the city of Alniun. He calls himself ‘king of the world’ and ‘king of kings,’ as well as ‘king of Nairi,’ the name under which the ‘Riverland’ of the north was known to the Assyrians, and we must accordingly see in him the founder of Van and the Vannic empire. In 831 B.C. he was defeated by the general of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III, who entitles him king of Ararat (p. 24). A few years previously, in 859 and 855 B.C., the ‘king of Ararat,’ who was Shalmaneser’s antagonist, had been Arame, whose capital was Arzaskun on the northern shore of Lake Van (p. 20 sq). The imperial titles assumed by Sarduris, therefore, as well as his selection of a new capital, which henceforth remained the centre of the kingdom, make it probable that he was the founder of a new dynasty, Arame having been one of the ‘kings’ of whom he claimed to be overlord. (Sayce 173)
There is still no scholarly consensus on the succession of Urartian rulers after Sarduri II:
The order of the Urartian kings following Sarduri II, son of Argišti I, remains unclear. As Roaf (2012: 187-216) has shown, there are several possible scenarios—some more likely than others. (Christiansen)
Erimena is only known as the father of a King Rusa. It is possible, therefore, that Rusa son of Erimena was a usurper, who tried to establish a new dynasty. Rusa son of Rusa, then, may have been his successor, while Sarduri son of Sarduri may have been a rival claimant to the throne, being the son of the Sarduri son of Rusa. I suggest, therefore, the following list of the rulers of Urartu:
As we have seen, native sources for the history of Mitanni have yet to be found. The succession of rulers must be deduced from contemporary records of Assyrians, Egyptians, “Hittites”, and others. The following table seems to command broad acceptance among conventional scholars, though some of the Mitannian royal names have several variants (the use of š instead of sh is a particularly common practice):
It is interesting that the Mitannian dynasty split into two factions after a succession of six or seven rulers. As we have seen, the Urartian dynasty may have split into two factions after a succession of perhaps eight rulers. In the case of Mitanni, the split occurred apparently when two sons of Shuttarna II contested the throne: Artashumara and Tushratta. Note also that both dynasties are thought to have flourished for about 250 years: Mitanni (1510-1260), Urartu (845-595).
Richard E Jarol of the University of Toronto Scarborough, whose Masters thesis was on the contributions of Mitanni to the history of the Ancient Near East, reconstructed a slightly different succession. He also records slightly different forms of some of the royal names:
One of the first historical references to Mitanni comes to us again from the Hittites. In 1595 B.C. their powerful ruler Muršilis I made a spectacular foray on Babylonia. Returning from the plunder, he was attacked somewhere along the Euphrates by a Hurrian army ... The Mitannian kingdom was already set up and therefore this was their assertion of territorial rights ... The Mitannian king who intercepted Muršilis was either ...irta (Kirta or Dirta) the father of Šuttarna I or his grandfather, if there existed a hitherto unknown son ... (Jarol 23 ... 24)
...irta’s great significance included his involvement in the Mitannian outburst, in the Hurrian Blossoming and in the setting up of a distinct kingdom ... (Jarol 26)
... during this time (1490) king Parattarna died ... (Jarol 43)
... the great Tuthmosis III embarked upon his victorious campaigns. One of the reasons was to repress revolts against his allegiance, the most notable being organized by the large city of Kadesh. We learn from his annals that “the powerful king of Mitanni was assisting them” ... There are three possibilities for this Mitannian king. The first one would be during the latter years of Parattarna, ca. 1500, who certainly was a great king. The second possibility was Šaušatar, who at the time of the Egyptian campaign would be very young. A third figure could have been a hitherto unknown Mitannian king, Parattarna’s son. (Jarol 45)
Local conditions in the individual city-states under Mitannian overlordship are portrayed from Nuzi and Alalakh. Nuzi inscriptions are mainly economic in nature, and offer insights into this aspect of the kingdom. There are two historical notes. “Šaušattar, king of Mitanni” represents one of the earliest references to Mitanni anywhere. On the basis of fragments like these the Mitannian king list was produced. (Jarol 82)
Armies from the land of Egypt made regular inroads into Syria, one of which occurred under Tuthmosis I. The earliest reference to Mitanni has to do with this campaign. “When his Majesty reached Nahrin [Mitanni] ... the enemy was marshalling his troops ... His Majesty made a slaughter of them.” This is an early evidence of an Egyptian foray into Mitanni, when they were ruled probably by Parattarna. (Jarol 83-84)
The Mitannian king Artatama reigned ca 1425-1410. Shortly after his ascension to the throne he sent his daughter to Tuthmoses IV as his wife ... The next Mitannian king Šuttarna II sent his daughter Gilukhepa with an array of 317 attendants to Amenophis III ... Apparently after Šuttarna’s death Artasama, brother of Tušratta, reigned for a short time. This Artasama apparently was murdered as a result of a conspiracy led by a certain Tuhi. A brief chaotic period was stabilized by Tušratta, who as a youth liquidated Tuhi and his party and ascended the throne ... We are extremely fortunate to have found among the Tell el-Amarna Tablets letters from King Tušratta, which give us wonderful insight into the latter part of his reign. We can also glean information about the preceding decades. (Jarol 85 ... 86)
At the end Mitanni was not fully conquered by the Hittites, but was divided between the Assyrians and Alše. A period of anarchy followed, but soon the Hittites placed Mattiwaza, Tušratta’s son, on the Mitannian throne. He became a Hittite vassal, as they now needed a buffer state against rising Assyria ... Apparently a royal struggle for power between two sons of Tušratta, Mattiwaza and Šutarna III, overshadowed Mitanni for some time now, destabilizing the political situation. Šutarna is only known infrequently, but he had to be pro-Egyptian or at least stood for the old Mitannian kingdom, whereas Mattiwaza is seen as a rebel with pro-Hittite feelings. (Jarol 96)
The independent Mitannian kingdom then disintegrated. Whether Šuttarna III was ever crowned we do not know. All we know is that he struggled for the throne with his brother Mattiwaza. In the meantime the Hittites gladly received the latter. (Jarol 97)
Jarol, of course, does not equate Mitanni with Urartu. In the conventional chronology, these kingdoms belong to different millennia. But he does suggest that the Urartians were the descendants of the Mitannians:
Related to the subject of Mitannian Disintegration is the question of the survival of a possible remnant ... In name Mitanni survived, ruled under the Hittite suzerainty by Mattiwaza ... Politically the area of Khabur experienced a brief revival around 1260 B.C. under Šatuara, recognized as a king of Hanigalbat [Mitanni] ... it seems evident that a large segment of a Mitannian remnant found their way northward and settled in the later kingdom of Urartu ... several Mitannian seals, datable to the final phase of Mitanni, were discovered at Lchashen on Lake Sevan [200 km NE of Lake Van in Armenia] (Jarol 97 ... 98)
It is curious that Mitannian seals of, supposedly, the 13th century BCE, were produced in Urartu about four centuries before the rise of the Kingdom of Urartu. What exactly was Jarol’s Mitannian remnant doing during those centuries?
Jarol’s Mitannian king list is as follows:
In a paper published in 2017, Mirjo Salvini provides the following table of synchronisms between the Neo-Assyrian and Urartian Kings. Note that when Salvini says quotes, he clearly means mentions:
Another scholar, Mirko Novák of the University of Tübingen, has compiled the following set of synchronisms involving the Kings of Mitanni (note that his succession of kings is slightly different from Jarol’s):
Any attempt to identify the Kingdom of Mitanni with the Kingdom of Urartu must reconcile these synchronisms. The Mitannians were contemporaries of several Egyptian Pharaohs of the 18th and 19th Dynasties from Thutmose I to Ramesses II, while the Urartians were in regular conflict with several Neo-Assyrian Emperors from Shalmaneser III to Ashurbanipal. Mitanni and Urartu cannot be identified unless these particular Pharaohs reigned contemporaneously with these particular Assyrian Emperors.
Obviously Mitanni and Urartu cannot be the same in Heinsohn’s model of the Short Chronology. Heinsohn identified Mitanni with Media, and the Neo-Assyrians with the Persians. In his model, Urartu is contemporary with the Persian Empire and later than the Empire of the Medes, while the 19th Dynasty is contemporary with the Medes and earlier than the Persians.
But Heinsohn’s is not the only model of the Short Chronology. In Emmet Sweeney’s model, for example, the Neo-Assyrians comprised both the Medes and their Persian successors. From Shalmaneser III to Ashurbanipal we have the Median and Persian Emperors from Cyaxares II down to Darius II. This places the Kingdom of Urartu roughly between 600-400. But in Sweeney’s model, the period from Thutmose I to Ramesses II covers roughly 700-550. This allows room for some overlap between Mitanni and Urartu, but precludes us from identifying them (Sweeney passim).
If, on the other hand, we use the model of Lynn E Rose and Charles Ginenthal, the Mitannians are pushed back to perhaps 750-570, while the Urartians are left more or less where they are. Again, there may be some overlap between Mitanni and Urartu, but not nearly enough to make them contemporary, let alone identical (Ginenthal 655 et passim).
It is hard to see how we can equate these two kingdoms, given these two sets of synchronisms. It would be easier, in fact, to accept Jarol’s hypothesis that the Kingdom of Urartu was created by a remnant of Mitanni. As we have seen, in the conventional chronology this hypothesis requires an inexplicable gap of about four centuries between the fall of Mitanni and the rise of Urartu. In the Short Chronology, however, this gap disappears. It is entirely plausible that when Mitanni was collapsing, some Mitannians fled from Mitanni (in northern Syria) to Urartu (or Nairi in Armenia) and immediately carved out a new kingdom for themselves—one which was to be a thorn in the side of both the Median and Persian Empires for the next few centuries.
In this scenario, Rusakhini must have been named for the old Mitannian capital Wassuganni: Wassuganni and Rusakhini shared the same name, but they were not one and the same city.
It is even tempting to identify the last known King of Mitanni, Šattuara II, with Sarduri I of Urartu. The names are certainly similar. Could the latter be a Hurrian rendering of a Sanskrit name? Sarduri calls himself son of Lutipri. Unfortunately, we do not know who Šattuara’s father was. The following table is an attempt to present both sets of synchronisms in the context of the Short Chronology:
Whichever model of the Short Chronology we follow, it is impossible to identify the Kingdom of Mitanni with the Kingdom of Urartu. In the next article in this series, we will explore an alternative model of the Short Chronology that promises to square this particular circle.
And that’s a good place to stop,
