Mehmet Kusman spent little time at school, but his fascination with the ancient Urartian kingdom began when he encountered inscriptions carved into the black basalt walls of Cavustepe fortress in eastern Türkiye.
Now 86, Kusman has devoted six decades to the site and to studying the language of Urartu, an ancient kingdom that flourished between the ninth and seventh centuries BC.
After completing military service in the 1960s, Kusman worked as a labourer on excavations at Cavustepe, where he discovered his first stele. Fascinated by its cuneiform inscription, he began copying texts unearthed across Türkiye, Iran and Armenia, despite being discouraged from learning the difficult script.
He said he mastered its alphabet within three years, but spent another 22 years learning around 650 words.
Kusman has since become a local celebrity, giving lectures about Urartu abroad and calling himself “one of the last seven people in Türkiye to speak the Urartian language”. However, academics caution that the claim is difficult to verify. Erkan Konyar of Istanbul University said historians still do not know exactly how Urartian was pronounced and have only a limited vocabulary and number of surviving texts.
Mehmet Isikli of Ataturk University added that Urartian may have been primarily a written language rather than one commonly spoken by the kingdom’s people.
Despite the doubts, Kusman continues to welcome visitors to Cavustepe. Calling himself “a descendant of the Urartians”, he remains determined to keep their culture and history alive.
For Kusman, the ancient kingdom may have disappeared, but its memory lives on through him. — AFP
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