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A large body, under the name Gimirrai or Cimmerians, descended on Asia Minor in the seventh century and swept it to the western edge of the plateau and beyond; others pressed into central and eastern Armenia, and, by weakening the Vannic king, enabled Ashurbanipal to announce the humiliation of Urartu; others again ranged behind Zagros and began to break through to the Assyrian valleys.
Their name is found also on the monuments of the kings of Ararat or Armenia who reigned in the ninth and eighth centuries before our era, and who had borrowed from Nineveh the cuneiform system of writing. But the Khata of these Vannic or Armenian texts lived considerably to the north of the Hittites of the Bible and of the Egyptian and Assyrian monuments.
Both he and Sarduris III were on friendly terms with the Assyrians, for we know that they both sent embassies to Ashur-bani-pal. By far the larger number of rock-inscriptions that have yet been found and copied in the mountainous districts bordering on Assyria were engraved by this ancient Vannic people, and Drs.
The Vannic state continued to flourish and its kings whose names are more European in sound than Asiatic Lutipris, Sarduris, Menuas, Argistis, Rusas built themselves strong fortresses which stand to this day about Lake Van, and borrowed a script from their southern foes to engrave rocks with records of successful wars.
The expedition of Tiglath-pileser III did not succeed in crushing the Vannic empire, for Rusas I, the son and successor of Sarduris II, allied himself to the neighbouring mountain races and gave considerable trouble to Sargon, the Assyrian king, who was obliged to undertake an expedition to check their aggressions.
By 800 B.C., in spite of efforts made by Shalmaneser's sons to continue their father's policy of pushing the war into the enemy's country, the Vannic king had succeeded in replacing Assyrian influence by the law of Khaldia in the uppermost basin of the Tigris and in higher Mesopotamia the "Nairi" lands of Assyrian scribes; and his successors would raid farther and farther into the plains during the coming age.
Both Ashurnatsirpal and Shalmaneser led raid after raid into the northern mountains in the hope of weakening the tribes from whose adhesion that Vannic Kingdom might derive strength. Both kings marched more than once up to the neighbourhood of the Urmia Lake, and Shalmaneser struck at the heart of Urartu itself three or four times; but with inconclusive success.
The district inhabited by the Vannic people was known to the Assyrians by the name of Urartu, and although the inscriptions of the earlier Assyrian kings do not record expeditions against that country, they frequently make mention of campaigns against princes and petty rulers of the land of Na'iri.
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