Creating a Culture

Creating a Culture examines how a small state on the Armenian Highlands developed into one of the most distinctive polities of Western Asia in the early Iron Age. Drawing on archaeological finds, inscriptions, and visual art, Annarita S. Bonfanti traces in her study how the rulers of Urartu deliberately shaped and imposed their identity across a geographically fragmented landscape. Material culture lies at the heart of the analysis: objects, architecture and imagery, what we often refer to as “art”, become evidence of how political authority, religious concepts, and cultural imagination interacted to shape the local experience of the royal dynasty. Bonfanti places Urartu within wider debates on how states create cohesion and shows how the royal dynasty adapted older traditions by selectively borrowing motifs and technologies and transforming them into a recognizably Urartian visual and ideological language. Objects functioned as symbols of power and as active tools for organizing space, communicating hierarchy, and securing loyalty. By interpreting material culture as a medium through which people negotiated their identity, the study connects Urartu to broader theories of identity formation, landscape use, and cultural production. It offers a synthesis of current scholarship while proposing a fresh view of how ancient states used imagery, environment, and tradition to imagine themselves and make that imagined identity tangible across the mountains and valleys over which they claimed to rule.