Lake Urmia - History

History

One of the early mentions of Lake Urmia is from the Assyrian records from 9th century BCE. There, in the records of Shalmaneser III (reign 858-824 BCE), two names are mentioned in the area of Lake Urmia: Parsuwash and Matai. It is not completely clear whether these referred to places or tribes or what their relationship was to the subsequent list of personal names and "kings". But Matais were Medes and linguistically the name "Parsuwash" matches the Old Persian word pārsa– an Achaemenid ethno-linguistic designation.

Lake Matianus (Latin: Lacus Matianus) is an old name for Lake Urmia. It was the center of the Mannaean Kingdom, a potential Mannaean settlement, represented by the ruin mound of Hasanlu, was on the south side of Lake Matianus. Mannae was overrun by a people who were called Matiani or Matieni, an Iranic people variously identified as Scythian, Saka, Sarmatian, or Cimmerian. It is not clear whether the lake took its name from the people or the people from the lake, but the country came to be called Matiene or Matiane.

The lake is named after the provincial capital city of Urmia, originally a Syriac name meaning city of water. In the early 1930s, it was called Lake Rezaiyeh (Persian: دریاچه رضائیه‎) after Reza Shah Pahlavi, but after the Iranian Revolution in the late 1970s, the lake was renamed 'Urmia'. Its ancient Persian name was Chichast (meaning, "glittering"–a reference to the glittering mineral particles suspended in the lake water and found along its shores). In the medieval times it came to be known as Lake Kabuda, or "azure", in Persian, ('կապույտ' or "Kapuyt/Gabuyd" in Armenian).