267 10 Role and Characteristics of Irrigation in the Kingdom of Urartu Emily Hammer, University of Pennsylvania In the ninth to seventh centuries bce, portions of present-day eastern Turkey, northwest- ern Iran, Naxçıvan (Azerbaijan), and Armenia belonged to the kingdom of Urartu (Biainili), one of the world’s earliest highland-based empires and the earliest historically atested polity in the South Caucasus. Stone fortresses on hills and royal inscriptions carved into architectural blocks or living bedrock mark Urartian control throughout this mountainous region, which consists of mostly small, sometimes irrigable plains separated from each other by large tracts of agriculturally marginal land. Urartian inscriptions frequently men- tion kings’ roles in constructing various types of water management features, including irrigation canals, reservoirs, fountains, and cisterns. Historians and archaeologists have long lef Urartu on the sidelines of debates about the relationship between irrigation and state development, in part because Urartu is located on the highland fringes of “core” areas of early political complexity in the Near East and in part because the study of material remains of Urartian irrigation through landscape archaeology has lagged far behind that of other major Near Eastern empires. Some scholars have referred to Urartu as a “hy- draulic society” exemplifying cross-culturally observed historical relationships between centralized bureaucracies and large, state-sponsored irrigation structures that enabled the production of agricultural surplus. 1 Te arid alluvial plains under surveillance by Urartian fortresses are environments in which agricultural intensifcation ofen requires irrigation, and royal inscriptions have long been taken at face value in support of a view that irri- gation systems were constructed by the state in order to increase agricultural surplus. However, others have questioned the general idea that Urartu was a centralized state for at least part of its history. 2 A recent review ofers an alternative hypothesis that Urartian-era irrigation systems could have been constructed independently by local rulers and in some cases would have provided water for increasing the production of animal fodder rather than crops for human consumption. 3 Tis chapter reviews and reassesses conficting views about the political and econom- ic role of irrigation in Urartu and ofers two preliminary landscape archaeology studies of Urartian-era irrigation structures. Te frst examines textually described irrigation 1 Belli 1997; Garbrecht 1988. 2 Bernbeck 2003–4. 3 Çifci and Greaves 2013.