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Against his northern neighbors he contended with unusual success, and towards the close of his reign he reckoned, not only the Minni, but the Urarda, or true Armenians, among his tributaries. Towards the south, he added to the empire the great country of Susiana, never subdued until his reign: and on the west, he signally chastised if he did not actually conquer, the Arabs.
The Medes and Persians are at this period no more powerful than the Zimri, the Minni, the Urarda, or than half a dozen others of the border nations, whose appellations sound strange in the ears even of the advanced student.
There is reason to believe that between the time when we obtain this view of the primitive Armenian peoples and that at which we next have any exact knowledge of the condition of the country the time of the Persian monarchy a great revolution had taken place in the region. The Nairi, Urarda, and Minni were Turanian, or, at any rate, non-Arian, races.
They had changed their national appellation; for while in the Assyrian period the terms Nairi and Urarda had preponderated, under the Persians they had come to be called Armenians and their country Armenia. The personal names of individuals in the country, both men and women, had acquired a decidedly Arian cast.
Of these three races, the Urarda were the most powerful, and it was with them that the Assyrians waged their most bloody wars. The capital city of the Urarda was Van, on the eastern shores of the lake; and here it was that their kings set up the most remarkable of their inscriptions.
The later names of the series can be identified with those of kings who contended with Assyrian monarchs belonging to the last, or Sargonid dynasty; and hence we are entitled approximately to fix the series to the seventh and eighth centuries before our era. The Urarda must at this time have exercised a dominion over almost the whole of the region to which the name of Armenia commonly attaches.
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