Red burnished wine jug
Urartian, 7th century BC
From Karmir Blur, Republic of
Armenia
These round, red-burnished jugs are typical of
Urartian sites and are sometimes of very fine quality. They were
used for removing small quantities of wine from huge storage jars.
A store-room next to the wine cellars at Karmir Blur contained 1036
wine jugs of this type.
The
Urartian name for Karmir Blur ('Red Hill') was
Teishebaini, 'the city of Teisheba' (the god of
storms). A fortress was built here by King Rusa II (about 685-645
BC). This has been excavated, but only small areas of the
partially-fortified residential town have been explored. It seems
the houses were clustered together in groups, with up to five
houses in each, and the groups were arranged along eleven streets.
The citadel itself is
thought to have been used by an administrator, perhaps a governor,
and his court. It consisted of 150 rooms and projecting towers
built over a storeroom on a platform of stone rubble. The palace
ceremonial quarters were on an upper floor, located above the
storerooms and workshops. Seven wine cellars were found with
pithoi (large storage
vessels) sunk into the floor. These had a total capacity of 9000
gallons. In addition there were granaries estimated to hold up to
750 tons of grain. 'They had timber roofs, the pinewood
beams of which were so well preserved that a local violin-maker was
able to use a piece of the wood to make the sounding board of a
violin which was played by a member of the Erevan Philharmonic
Orchestra.'
(Piotrovsky)
The Urartians
were the neighbours and main rivals of the north Mesopotamian
Assyrians during the ninth and eighth centuries BC. They disappear
from history in the sixth century, perhaps as a result of invasions
of nomadic groups such as the Scythians from central Asia,
associated with the Medes from western Iran
B. Piotrovsky, The ancient civilization of Ur (Geneva, Nagel, 1969)
D. Collon, Ancient Near Eastern art (London, The British Museum Press, 1995)
M. Joukowsky, Early Anatolia (Kendall Hunt, 1996)