Note 43 — Chapter IV · VAN

The culture of the Vannic kingdom was perhaps borrowed from the Assyrians and was certainly derived from the Mesopotamian plains. The legend of the passion of the queen of Assyria, the consort of the eponymous hero Ninus, for an Armenian king who suffers death at her hands and is restored to life,43 contains, so far as it expresses the intercourse of the pre-Armenian peoples, a considerable kernel of truth. Ara and Semiramis are none other than Tammuz and Istar, the Adonis and the Aphrodite of the Hellenic myth; and the advent from Assyria of the voluptuous queen in quest of a beautiful but reluctant lover may be connected with the introduction from abroad of the worship of Istar.44 However this may be, it is certain that the earliest inscriptions found at Van are in the Assyrian language and character; while those of the successors of Sarduris the First, although composed in the Vannic tongue, show but slight deviations from the cuneiform writing as practised at Nineveh. There is evidence to show that long after the disappearance of the empire of the Khaldians Assyrian influences lingered on in the land. I shall have occasion to remark these traces in the study of the architecture of the church at Akhtamar; and they compose a factor which should never be quite absent from the mind when examining the masterpieces of Armenian mediæval art. The Vannic dynasty are not the symbol of resistance on the part of rude mountaineers to the approach of civilisation moving up from its immemorial seats. Far rather do they represent the beneficent spread of arts and letters over the Armenian plains. The favourite sites of their cities are not the recesses of the mountains of the tableland, but some small eminence from a wide extent of level and fertile ground, as typically embodied by the rock of Van and the mound of Armavir. They are builders of canals to irrigate the land, of roads to traverse even the scarcely passable ridges of the peripheral region, of bridges to span the great rivers. If we are still in the dark with respect to their ethnic affinities, we need harbour no doubts upon the character of the civilisation which they contributed to diffuse.