Review of linguistic studies about Urartus in Azerbaijan

The Urartu civilization is one of the old civilizations of the Azerbaijan region. Urartus ruled over northwestern part of Iran, Caucasia, eastern Turkey and even northern part of today Syria. Their language does not belong to Indo-European or Semitic language families. Their language was an agglutinative language. There are lots of inscriptions related to Urartus in East Azerbaijan, West Azerbaijan and Ardabil in northwestern Iran. These inscriptions and Urartu castles in the region have Turkish names. The researcher tried to find out whether there is any relationship between Urartu language and Azerbaijani Turkish language of local people of the region. The cognate based study and comparing roots of the words between ancient Turkish and Urartu language showed that Urartu and Turkish words have the same roots. There are also grammatical similarities between these two languages in using suffixes like –li and –ni for showing relationship and possessiveness. Furthermore, in Urartu language like Kazakh Turkish suffix –u is used to make an infinitive verb. Some Uratian names like Turkish names start with prefix ar/er. The name of some Urartian Gods have meaning in Turkish. As a result, Urartu language must be an Altaic language and a proto-Turkic language.

Keywords:

Azerbaijan , cognate-based studies , fusion language/ agglutinative language , urartu