Teishebaini (Karmir Blur)

Feel the ground under your feet first. It is loose, dry, and faintly red. That colour gives this low hill its Armenian name, Karmir Blur, which means Red Hill. The wind comes up from the river valley below, and it carries dust and the smell of dry grass. Around you, the walls are low and soft-edged. They are not cut stone. They are clay. And that clay held an entire city.

This is Teishebaini, a fortress of the kingdom of Urartu. Urartu was a powerful Iron Age state that ruled the highlands around Lake Van and the Ararat plain almost three thousand years ago. Its people spoke a language that has no living descendants. They wrote in cuneiform, the wedge-shaped script of ancient Mesopotamia. For a time, Urartu was one of the great rivals of Assyria. This hill was one of its northern strongholds.

The name Teishebaini means the City of Teisheba. Teisheba was the Urartian god of storms, thunder and war. He was one of the three highest gods of the kingdom. To name a fortress after him was a statement of power. The builder was King Rusa the Second, who ruled in the seventh century before Christ. Cuneiform inscriptions found here name Rusa, son of Argishti, as the king behind the city.

Here is the first surprise. Teishebaini was not the first Urartian centre in Yerevan. Across the city, on another hill, stands Erebuni, founded about a century earlier. Erebuni is the fortress that gives Yerevan its claim to be one of the world's older cities. Teishebaini later took over as the main administrative seat in this region. Some of Erebuni's treasures were carried here. So the story of Yerevan's ancient past runs between two hills, not one.

The fortress worked like a royal warehouse. Its main job was to collect, store and redistribute the wealth of the surrounding farmland. Grain, wine, oil and livestock came in from the valley. Officials counted it, sealed it and stored it. Archaeologists uncovered long rows of storerooms inside the citadel. In many of them, huge clay jars stood sunk into the floor, packed side by side. Each jar could hold far more than a person could lift.

Now the second surprise. The city did not fade away slowly. It ended in fire. Around the end of the seventh century or the start of the sixth century before Christ, attackers stormed the fortress and burned it. The roofs collapsed onto the storerooms. That disaster was terrible for the people inside. But for archaeologists, it was extraordinary. The fire and the falling clay sealed the stores almost exactly as they were on the last day.

Excavators found carbonised grain still lying in the bins. They found traces of wine in the great jars, and remains of sesame oil. They found textiles, wooden objects and tools that normally rot away within a few generations. It was a snapshot of an ancient economy, frozen at the moment of its collapse. Among the debris were arrowheads of a type often linked to Scythian and other steppe warriors. Many scholars connect the attack with these northern horsemen, though the exact identity of the attackers is still debated.

The most famous finds are bronze. Archaeologists recovered shields, helmets and quivers, many decorated with rows of lions, bulls and chariots. Some carry inscriptions in the names of earlier kings, Argishti the First and Sarduri the Second. These objects were likely older treasures, brought here from Erebuni and kept in the storerooms. Picture the scene. Weapons that had already been heirlooms for generations lay waiting in the dark when the fire came.

The man most closely linked to this site is Boris Piotrovsky, a Soviet archaeologist. He led excavations here starting in 1939, and work continued for many years after. His team turned an unremarkable red hill into one of the best-known Urartian sites anywhere. Piotrovsky later became director of the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. For him, Karmir Blur was the work that shaped a lifetime.

If you want to see the treasures, you will need to go into the city. The objects from Teishebaini are held mainly in Yerevan's museums, including the History Museum of Armenia and the Erebuni Museum. Here on the hill, you have something different. You have the setting itself. You can stand where the storerooms stood, and look out over the land that once filled them.

Look at the walls closely. The Urartians usually built on foundations of large stones, then raised the upper walls in sun-dried mud brick. Stone kept the damp out. Mud brick was cheap, thick and cool in summer. Today the brick has weathered back toward the earth it came from. Edges are rounded. Surfaces crack in the sun. In places, it is hard to tell where the wall ends and the hill begins.

Now lift your eyes. The hill rises above the valley of the Hrazdan river, which cuts through Yerevan on its way south. Modern apartment blocks and roads crowd the slopes around the site. It can feel strange — an Iron Age fortress with traffic noise drifting up from below. But that contrast is part of the experience. Ordinary daily life now surrounds a place that was once a centre of royal power. On a clear day, look south toward the Ararat plain, the farmland that fed this fortress.

Before you leave, stand still for a moment. Notice the red dust on your shoes. Notice the silence between the gusts of wind, and the city sounds beyond it. Somewhere under your feet, the floors of those storerooms once held jars of wine and bins of grain, waiting for a harvest that never came. As you walk back down the hill, look again at the colour of the soil. It is the same red that gave this place its name.