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Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology & the Ancient World
Brown University
Box 1837 / 60 George Street
Providence, RI 02912
Telephone: (401) 863-3188
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Stones of Ayanis: (architectural) technologies of placemaking and architectonic culture at an Urartian city
During the 8th and 7th century BC, the Lake Van basin (Eastern Turkey) underwent a remarkable process of urbanization and reconfiguration of its political landscapes at the time of Urartian kingdom. While the political geography of the Urartian state was transformed continuously with the foundation of new urban centers, the initiation of large-scale building projects is attested both epigraphically and archaeologically. The newly created urban spaces became distinctive with a particularly striking architectural culture, with their stone built “tower” temples, columnar halls, new forms of ceremonial spaces embedded in prominent rocky outcrops of the regions, rock-cut funerary monuments and the outstanding technology of finely carved stone masonry. The recent excavations at the 7th century site of Ayanis, ancient Rusahinili Eiduru-kai, has revealed impressive citadel fortifications and a well-preserved temple complex dedicated to the state cult of Haldi. Based on the author’s fieldwork on stone carving techniques at the site and other contemporaneous sites in the Lake Van basin, the paper will argue for the formation of a distinctive tectonic culture through the activities of the Urartian king’s workshop of stone masons, one that was interregionally shared by Assyria and the Syro-Hittite states. It will be suggested that the highly refined stone masonry in Urartu was a symbolically charged architectural technology that effectively operated as royal insignia in the public sphere, but it also derived from the local corpus of building knowledge in the Lake Van basin. The paper argues that architectural technologies are located and local in the most literal sense, as they cultivate and articulate that which is already there in a meaningful landscape. Furthermore, as it is clear in the discursive content of the Urartian royal inscriptions (with statements such as “the rock was untouched”), the innovative stone technologies of “marrying” of the bedrock and the masonry in particular may be understood as an architectonic incorporation of and a political claim to a “natural” place in the context of an imperial(ist) building project.