Nairi

According to Trevor Bryce, the Nairi lands were inhabited by "fierce tribal groups" divided into a number of small principalities. According to Bryce, parts of Urartu, a state of Nairi, corresponded to the Azzi of Hittite texts from the same period. The names of twenty-three Nairi lands were recorded by Tiglath-Pileser I (r. 1114–1076 BCE). Their southernmost point was Tumme, known to have been south-west of Lake Urmia, and their northernmost point was Daiaeni. Other inscriptions describing Tiglath-Pileser's campaign number the defeated kings at thirty or sixty. In 882 BCE, Assurnasirbal II invaded Nairi, which at the time comprised four polities: Bit-Zamani, Shubru, Nirdun, and Urumu/Nirbu. These regions all had their own kings. In particular, Assurnasirbal conquered the fortified city of Madara, along with sixty other "cities" ruled by a certain Lapturi. Bryce states that some of his "royal inscriptions indicate that the term [Nairi] now also denoted a specific region to the southwest of Lake Urmia, centred on the land of Hubushkia." The exact location of Hubushkia is uncertain. Shalmaneser pursued Kakia, king of Nairi and Hubushkia, into the mountains, subsequently slaughtering his army and forcing him to surrender. In Mirjo Salvini's view, despite their identification in some sources, Urartu and Nairi referred to separate entities until the expansion of the former in the late 9th century BCE. By that time, Urartu had probably conquered so much of the Nairi lands that the "early Urartian kings felt Nairi was a suitable name for the kingdom they ruled." Caught between expanding Urartu and Assyria, Nairi's existence as an independent entity ended in the early 8th-century BCE. In the mid-8th century BCE, part of Nairi is mentioned as an Assyrian province, while in the 7th century BCE, the term is occasionally used in Assyrian sources to refer to the province of Amedi (modern Diyabakır). == Populations ==

Albrecht Goetze suggested that what he refers to as the Hurriland dissolved into a number of small states that the Assyrians called Nairi. Others regard this hypothesis skeptically; for example, Warren C. Benedict points out that there is no evidence of the presence of Hurrians in the vicinity of Lake Van. Linguistic evidence suggests that speakers of Proto-Armenian were present in the Armenian Highlands at least as early as the beginning of the 1st millennium BCE. According to Lorenzo D'Alfonso, the Nairi tribe Tuali may have moved west and founded the Iron Age neo-Hittite kingdom of Tabal. == In Armenian culture ==

Nairi (, Nayiri or ) is a poetic name of Armenia. It was notably used by the poets Vahan Terian and Yeghishe Charents as a synonym for Armenia. Yerkir Nairi (Land of Nairi) was the title of both Terian's collection of 18 poems written in the mid-1910s and a satirical novel by Charents, published in a complete volume in 1926. Terian wrote the poems while he was a student at the Saint Petersburg University's Department of Oriental Studies under Nicholas Marr, where he delved into ancient history. Terian successfully revived Nairi as an old name of Armenia. For Charents, Nairi is a national illusion. Critic Suren Aghababian described the novel as the cornerstone of Soviet Armenian prose. It has since become a unisex name among Armenians. It is sometimes spelled as Nayiri or Nyree, while Nairuhi (Nayiruhi) and Naira are exclusively female names. It has also been used for various things, including institutions, localities, and products: • Nairi Cinema, established in the 1920s, is Yerevan's oldest movie theater. • '' (Land of Nairi'') is a 1930 feature-length documentary directed by Hamo Beknazarian (Armenkino). • Nayiri (Նայիրի) was a literary periodical, established by the writer Antranig Dzarugian in 1941. It was published in Aleppo, Syria until 1949 and in Beirut, Lebanon from 1951 to 1983. • In Soviet Armenia, a village and a district were named Nairi in 1963 and 1972, respectively. The village was renamed in 1991, while the district, centered around Yeghvard, was merged into the newly formed Kotayk Province in 1995. The Nairi municipality (community), with its center in Yeghvard, came into existence as part of administrative reforms in 2021. • The Alashkert Stadium in Yerevan, built in the 1960s, was known as Nairi Stadium until it was acquired by FC Alashkert in 2013/2014. • The Nairi computer series were developed by the Yerevan Scientific Research Institute of Mathematical Machines (YerNIIMM) in the 1960s. • The Nairit was a major industrial enterprise in Yerevan, established in 1976 by the merger of the Yerevan Chemical Plant and the Polymers Research and Engineering Institute. Nairit was also the name of around 30 types of chloroprene synthetic rubber. They were named for Nairi. • The Nairi brandy is produced by the Yerevan Brandy Company since 1967. • Nairi Medical Center, founded in 2005, in Yerevan is one of Armenia's leading medical institutions. • The website Nayiri.com, founded in 2005, is a digital library and online dictionary that contains major dictionaries and several books in Classical, Western and Eastern Armenian. It also released Nayiriboard, a keyboard-spellchecker in 2020. == See also ==