Video: The Last Urartian Speaker

Since 1962, Mehmet Kuşman has worked as a caretaker at the site of the fortress at Çavuştepe in eastern Turkey’s Van Province. Çavuştepe is one of perhaps dozens of such fortresses in a vast network constructed during the Iron Age by the rulers of the Kingdom of Urartu, who controlled parts of eastern Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Iran from the ninth to the seventh century b.c. For decades, even long after his official retirement, Kuşman has studied, written, read, and spoken the Urartian language. In this video, listen as he reads some of the most famous Urartian inscriptions found at Çavuştepe and carves his own sayings and phrases in Urartian, which is more than 2,500 years old and remains barely known, even today. To read our full article on the Kingdom of Urartu, click here. Get your copy of the November/December 2026 issue of ARCHAEOLOGY on newsstands, and subscribe to explore more.