Oltisi: On the Etymology of the Name and the Real History of the Acropolis

Abstract

According to the documents Oltisi is a name of the walled-town in Tao, a historical region of Georgia. The transformed variant of this place-name Oltisi —Oltu (<-Oltisi)is a name of a modern small town around the historical fortress, situated in the Erzrum vilaiet in the Republic of Turkey. The place name Oltisi is also found in Tsalka, lower Kartli, Georgia.

In the stem of Oltis – Olt can be a stem and –is is a suffix that in the Georgian language field denotes: “originated from”,” related to,” as for the -Olt- I think it is one more phonetic variant of * Olti , the ancient Urartian-Kartvelian deity – Ardis / Khaldis/ Kartu; we can assume that the broad Khuritian-Urartian-Kartvelian space (beginning from Lake Vani to the eastern coast of the Black Sea) should have had shrines and worship places in the name of Ardi/Kartu, Khaldi. Correspondingly *ard —, the original root denoting the deity would undergo phonetic changes in the different language and dialectal field caused by the Labio- velarized excursion of the initial vowel resulting several variants according to the regular phonetic laws (a, va, ka/ cha, ka...u, a...u. *ard -> kard - /Kart (realized of the Labio-velar component as – k): Kart-l-i, Kard-an-a-kh-i; also cf.: Aghzevani/Kaghzevani.