The Serving cups of Necropolis in Van-Altıntepe

ABSTRACT In this thesis, I focus on the analysis of pottery found in the mortuary contexts at the site of Altintepe near Lake Van in eastern Anatolia. By using stylistic and statistical criteria, I attempted to demonstrate the role of offering or votive bowls in the Urartian burial custom. In this sense, I suggest that these pottery were used as containers for food and beverages. Because of the minimal number of contextual data, I used comparable evidence derived from the contemporary sites located in the Lake Van area. Because Altintepe share the same cultural tradition with those sites located nearby, I depended on mortuary evidence from these sites to reconstruct the ways in which the Altintepe pottery was used. Although much of the pottery found in Altintepe graves appears to be utilitarian in character, I suggest that those pottery found in the Altintepe graves were offerings to dead to serve him or her in afterlife. This seems to indicate that most of the graves from Altintepe belonged to the common people Urartu, since elite graves yielded pottery of high quality in other comparable sites of the Lake Van area.