Mehmet Kuşman did not spend very long at school, but he traced the ancient inscriptions chiseled into the black basalt rock and read: "Before me there was nothing. But by the power of the god Haldi I founded this city."
Kuşman, 86, has dedicated his life to the fortress of Çavuştepe in eastern Türkiye and to learning the language of the vanished kingdom of Urartu, to honor its forgotten gods and rulers.
Kuşman was hired as a laborer on the Çavuştepe excavations after his military service in the 1960s and there encountered his first stele.
"The inscription was very beautiful," he told Agence France-Presse (AFP). But the head of the dig discouraged him from learning this "very difficult" script, which borrowed its cuneiform alphabet from Assyrian.
"Him telling me 'No' hurt me," he said. "I became relentless, thinking: 'In my lifetime, I will learn it.'"
Despite a lack of formal education, Kuşman began copying the inscriptions found during excavations carried out in eastern Türkiye, Iran and Armenia, over which Urartu once stretched.
In three years, he said, he mastered the alphabet, but took 22 years to master 650 words of vocabulary.
Academics contacted by AFP praised Kuşman's enthusiasm and devotion. He has become something of a local curiosity, calling himself "one of the last seven people in Türkiye to speak the Urartian language."
Erkan Konyar, professor of ancient history at Istanbul University, describes the kingdom as "one of the most powerful states of the ancient Near East, between the ninth and seventh centuries B.C."
Urartu – more recent than the great Mesopotamian kingdoms of Assyria, Sumeria and Babylon – brought the tribal mountain communities together under a centralized state, building cities, fortresses, irrigation networks and vast food storage facilities, Konyar said.
Despite retiring in 2005, Kuşman continues to watch over Çavuştepe, said Konyar, a specialist on Tuspa, the kingdom's founding capital.
"For 60 years, he has lived amid the excavations and introduced thousands of visitors to the history of Urartu."
But Konyar is careful to qualify Kuşman's claims to speak the language. In fact, historians do not really know how it was pronounced, he said.
"The available inscriptions allow us to understand it up to a certain point, but we lack vocabulary and texts," he said. "Only the meaning of certain words is known with certainty. So no one can claim to speak Urartian."
"Even in the time of Urartu, people did not speak this language; it was only written," said Mehmet Işıklı, director of the Department of Near Eastern Archaeology at Atatürk University in Erzurum.
Kuşman's passion for the language has made him a local celebrity. His lectures have taken him "to America, five times, to Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium," he said, "Now, I'm thinking of going to Japan."
Işıklı is excavating the fortress of Ayanis, the last of the great strongholds built in the kingdom before it collapsed, 35 kilometers (22 miles) north of Van, with a commanding view of the lake.
"Our excavations may tell us something about the end of Urartu," he said, noting that researchers have found "the traces of a very powerful earthquake."
Işıklı admits to a certain respect for the old guardian.
"I admire him," he added. "He has worked hard and brought Urartian culture to light.
"Mehmet Kuşman provides a sort of publicity for Urartu, but it has nothing to do with academic work: he knows only a few alphabetical signs, or a few letters, and some very, very general information about them."
In his small stone hut at the entrance to the Çavuştepe site, Kuşman is undaunted by the doubters.
"I am a descendant of the Urartians, their grandson," he said. "They disappeared, but look, they are not all dead," he declared, as he stood to welcome visitors.
