Etiuni

Etiuni (other names Etiuḫi, Etiu, Etio) was the name of an early Iron Age tribal confederation in northern parts of Araxes River, roughly corresponding to the subsequent Ayrarat Province of the Kingdom of Armenia. Etiuni was frequently mentioned in the records of Urartian kings, who led numerous campaigns into Etiuni territory. It is very likely it was the "Etuna" or "Etina" which contributed to the fall of Urartu, according to Assyrian texts. Some scholars believe it had an Armenian-speaking population.

Names and etymology

Igor Diakonov wrote that Etiuni was a Urartian name meaning "land/people of Etio", whereas Mirjo Salvini preferred to read it as "Etiu". Ethnographer Armen Petrosyan suggested that this name could be a Urartian cuneiform rendering of Hatio (sometimes transliterated as Hattiyo or Hatiyo), which Diakonov had offered as a reconstructed initial form of the modern Armenian endonym, Hay (հայ).

The cuneiform writing system the Urartians used lacked a symbol to designate an "h" sound, so the Urartians used either a symbol usually meant to convey a laryngeal h (ḫ, χ), or opted to not use any symbol to try to convey this sound. Petrosyan, citing Diakonoff and Gevorg Jahukyan, said that Urartian "e" may correspond with Armenian "a" when used at the start of words.

Petrosyan, citing 19th-century linguists Friedrich Spiegel and Heinrich Kiepert, proposed that "Hatio" might ultimately derive from Proto-Indo-European *poti, meaning "lord, master, husband." According to this theory, the name, with plural suffix, developed from *potiio→*hetiyo→*hatiyo→hay.

The Urartians sometimes used the variation, Etiuḫi, which seems to have referred to the people of Etiuni specifically.