The past three decades have seen a surge of new excavation, survey and epigraphical data from the Iron Age kingdom of Urartu, originating from large-scale archaeological fieldwork in eastern Turkey, north-western Iran and southern Armenia. This monograph, based on a PhD dissertation defended in 2015 at Johns Hopkins University, is a rare recent example of a single-author volume devoted to this innovative highland state, whose strategies of expansion, extraction, control and communication provide parallels, but more often alternatives or even counterpoints to those employed by its longer and better-studied southern contemporary, the lowland-centred kingdom of Assyria. Anyone interested in these topics, and other mechanisms underpinning the imperial projects of the two rival states in the ninth to seventh centuries BC, will benefit from reading this book. As Tiffany Earley-Spadoni states, “Urartu is possibly the most important empire you [have] never heard of” (p.5) and her book offers a strong introduction to this state and, more broadly, to the political transformations of the Iron Age Middle East (pp.38–71: ‘Age of empires: an introduction to the early first millennium BCE’).
As co-director, with Arthur Petrosyan, of the Armenian Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, of the Vayots Dzor Fortress Landscapes Project since 2017 and previously a participant in the American-Azerbaijani excavations at Oğlanqala in Naxçıvan since 2008, Earley-Spadoni is well placed to address her topic from the vantage point of the highlands. Most studies on Urartu focus on the central region around Lake Van, where the long-time capital city of Tušpa (or Turušpa, modern Van Kalesi) was located, so the emphasis on Urartu’s Armenian and Iranian holdings offers a deliberate perspective from the northern and eastern peripheries around Lake Sevan and Lake Urmia, respectively. Her large-scale, multiregional approach—focusing on fortified, stone-built structures under state control and employing GIS and viewshed analysis to enhance their contextualisation—is structured around regions associated with distinct episodes of Urartian expansion into modern Armenia and Iran.
The book is both an update and a critical response to the influential volume by Paul Zimansky, Ecology and empire: the structure of the Urartian state (Reference Zimansky1985). Zimansky’s pioneering study relied more heavily on information provided by the state correspondence of Sargon II of Assyria (721–705 BC) and thus viewed Urartu through the sometimes distorting lens of Assyrian perceptions of its rival. In contrast, Earley-Spadoni uses the Assyrian data in a more explicitly comparative framework. In my view, the most important quality of her well-written and well-illustrated study is its emphasis on how differently the two states were organised (see especially pp.106–21: ‘Reframing Urartu as a non-urban empire’).
Their highly distinct ‘landscapes’ (pp.9–12) lie at the core of this argument: the visibility and intervisibility maps accompanying the analysis of Urartian sites demonstrate the importance of lines of sight in the organisation of this expansive mountain polity. Her argument that “fortified regional networks” constitute the building blocks of the Urartian imperial project (pp.122–61; also pp.184–88 & 246–49) is persuasive. The data and its analysis (especially pp.138–53) are particularly valuable for the study of long-distance communication, as she systematically investigates fire-beacon networks as a key structural element of Urartian state cohesion. In contrast to the contemporaneous Assyrian strategy of transporting written and verbal messages via mule-rider relay services along a state-maintained route network (as discussed in my chapter in State correspondences of the Ancient World from the New Kingdom to the Roman Empire; Radner Reference Radner and Radner2014), the Urartian system provided a less detailed but near-instantaneous mode of communication across difficult terrain, constituting a powerful and highly visible sign of imperial control.
Earley-Spadoni turns to questions of travel and transport in the section ‘Movement and mobility: the space of empire’ (pp.162–91), drawing more explicitly on Assyrian comparisons. To her discussion of roads and routes in Urartu (especially pp.170–176), one might add the role of the three large lakes as transport corridors. Ferries and other watercraft are still important on Lake Van and Lake Sevan, whereas ecological change has rendered navigation on Lake Urmia largely impossible due to its dramatic reduction in water levels. I recall seeing abandoned, rusting vessels on its salt-crusted basin in April 2002: a striking reminder of this transformation.
‘Warfare’, the other key term of the title, is analysed within its landscape context (introduced in ‘Landscapes of warfare: a historiography’ pp.17–37). This approach is well suited to the material, given the defensive, offensive and strategic functions of much surviving Urartian architecture, and the extent to which its construction or modification can be tied to episodes of expansion into northern and eastern territories (pp.71–105: ‘Views from the fortress: examining site placement’), often in direct competition with Assyria. Earley-Spadoni’s central thesis and argument that underpins the volume as a whole is that both states consciously reshaped the physical environment into instruments serving their respective imperial and military strategies.
In contrast to the largely data-driven approach of the earlier chapters, the later sections adopt a more comparative and theoretically oriented perspective. In ‘Traumascape: war and society writ large’ (pp.192–222), she integrates regional and, for Nineveh and Hasanlu, site-level evidence to demonstrate how archaeological analysis can render Assyrian and Urartian landscapes legible as warfare-marked ‘traumascapes’. The subsequent chapter, ‘Unravelling the why: ideologies that perpetuate landscapes of war’ (pp.223–44), reconstructs and compares the political and theological frameworks underpinning these states’ landscape interventions, particularly in the construction of fortified architecture.
The Conclusion (pp.245–53) synthesises the preceding discussions, returning to a firm focus on Urartu and highlighting several key findings, including: the importance of “fortified regional networks” for Urartian state design (pp.246–49); the “cost of imperialism”, conceived in material, human and ideological terms (pp.249–51); and the contribution of this study to ”dismantling the ‘usual Urartian model’” (pp.251–53), which posits “highly standardised, grand highland cities” (p.251) based largely on sites dating to the reign of Rusa son of Argišti in the mid-seventh century BC. Instead, Earley-Spadoni presents Urartu as a flexible and adaptive state, whose imperial strategies were “varied, opportunistic, and highly regional” (pp.251–52). The book succeeds in providing both the data and the interpretative framework to support this reassessment.
The bibliography (pp.255–89) and index (pp.291–300) complete a thoughtful and innovative study that deserves a wide readership. As the recipient of the 2025 Frank Moore Cross Award from the American Society of Overseas Research for the most substantial new volume in the field of the history of the ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean, it is also essential reading for those interested in state formation and cohesion in ancient Anatolia, Iran and the Caucasus.
