Like everyone else in the Middle East, the Urartians were hopelessly
outclassed by the Assyrian military. Still, they connived to expand
east and west around the flanks of the Assyrians, but were beaten in
both directions before their capital at Teispa (lake Van) was sacked.
I think the Urartians were still expanding northwards to modern-day
Armenia when the Cimmerian avalanche descended upon them and
destroyed them.
The Cimmerians were fleeing from the Scythians, who soon followed.
Cimmerian remnants survived in Anatolia, where they overthrew the
Phrygian kingdom, killed the Assyrian king in battle (Sargon II?) -
the only Assyrian warrior-king EVER to die in battle against an
enemy. The Cimmerians were finally defeated by the Lydians, and
seemingly disappeared.
Some say the Cimmerians were Thracians. I don't see how this is
possible. True, the Crimea was Thracian-speaking through the
classical era, suggesting they could have once ranged further east on
the steppes. However, for the Cimmerians to flee from the Scythians,
who could have only come from the east across the Siberian steppe,
would mean the Cimmerians would have been located originally
somewhere between the north Caucasic steppe and the steppe between
the Urals and the Volga (IMO).
Did the Cimmerians speak Armenian? It's plausible. Defeated on the
steppes by the Scythians, some Cimmerian warriors could have fled
across the Caucasus* where they finished off the weakened Urartian
kingdom. They were soon followed by the Scythians, who settled in
Azerbaijan (including NW Iran around Tabriz), and got involved in a
three-way political struggle with Assyria and the Medeo-Persians.
This explains why these areas were never settled by Armenians - the
Scythians needed these good pasture areas for their horses. Besides,
there were already farmers there that they could enslave and make
grow their food.
The Armenians followed behind as the subject vassals of the
Scythians.** They settled in the political vacuum of the east
Anatolian plateau as vassals of the Scythians, probably ruled by a
Scythian warrior elite. After all, the Scythians could not use this
area themselves for long - they just had to control it through
subject peoples while they faced south against the Medes just as the
Huns used Goths and other tribes to protect their flanks as they
faced the Romans.
After the destruction of Assyria, however, the Scythians, realizing
that they were in danger of defeat by the Medes, retreating back into
the steppes. The Scythians of the classical era are commonly
recognized as being Iranian-speakers. I think this is a bit
simplistic. The steppe empires were all polyglot kingdoms. Some are
wont to find evidence of Uralic and Turkic in their archaeology and
language remnants. They could have also included some Thracian
remnants and possibly some early Slavs. Could some Armenian remnants
have survived in Scythia before eventually being absorbed?
* I am a firm believer in the geo-political intelligence of the
northern "barbarians" such as the Celts, who knew when to attack
Greece at its moment of weakness in 279 BC, for instance. Here, the
Cimmerians knew that Urartu had been seriously weakened.
** I like the theory that the Scythians were at this time Altaic
mounted warriors - harbingers of the Huns, Avars, Mongols, et al.
--- In cybalist@..., markodegard@... wrote:
> This hopelessly famous and hopelessly obscure Caucasian kingdom was
> wrecked by the Assyrians in the 600s BCE. Tiglath-Pileser III,
> Shalmanser V and Sargon II were all involved (these personalities
are
> also recorded in the Bible).
>
> It seems the Urartian king wiped out some northerly, easterly, and
> westerly states for some obscure reason in response to the
aggression
> of Assyria; perhaps these states had given earth and water, as the
> Persians would later put it. When Assyria wiped out Urartu, they
> merely sacked, pillaged and burned; those not worth deporting as
> slaves were killed; Assyria then withdrew from this part of the
> Caucasus, leaving it to itself. We have a political and
socioeconomic
> vacuum.
>
> Nature and political science abhors a vacuum (consider what the
Slavs
> did after the Hunnic Confederacy collapsed). It is not unreasonable
to
> see the Armenians as being almost sucked up into this vacuum, a
force
> of nature sucking them up into the political and economic space
> formerly occupied by the (now-remnant) Urartian people: the
Armenians
> actually might have been *invited* to take over, considering the
utter
> chaos which must have reigned.
>
> You can almost see little Urartian family groups helping the
Armenians
> go up the river to settle the area -- one Urartian clan helping
> unrelated foreigners annihilate another closely-related Urartian
clan.
>
> The Caucasus is peripheral to a number of historic empires, but has
> never really been a long-term-item province-wise: it's too hard to
> hold and maintain considering the economic return. The whole
history
> of the region is long-term linguistic stability countermanded by
the
> success of those peripheral to it. Sargon II did to what is now
> Armenia more or less what Putin is doing to Chechnya or what
Taliban
> is doing to portions of Afganistan.
>
> Of course, you have to accept that the Armenians were elsewhere,
more
> or less camped on the shores of the Caspian for this to be the way
it
> was (Azerbaijan). But then, this is also when Medes and Persians
> started to do their thing. It's as if, for a moment in history,
> disorder in the Caucasus affected their neighbors instead of the
usual
> other way around.
>
> Sargon II is sorta like Hitler. He really did mess up ethnic and
> linguistic boundaries, wrecking everthing in his wake.
>
> Assyria messed up the Middle East -- and the Caucasus. Sorta like
what
> Attila did to Ukraine and places west.
>
> Imagine a world-war fought mainly in the Caucasus.