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.'"
