At the head of the pantheon was a trinity consisting of Khaldis, the supreme god of the race; Teisbas, the god of the air; and the Sun-god Ardinis. Temples were erected in their honour, and shields and spears dedicated to their service. The vine, which grows wild in Armenia, was the sacred tree of the people, and there are inscriptions which commemorate its planting and consecration, and describe the endowments that were set apart for its maintenance. Wine was naturally offered to the gods along with the domestic animals and prisoners of war. Dr. Belck has discovered burial-places which go back to the neolithic age, but the majority of the monuments scattered over the Vannic area belong to the bronze age, and testify to a native adaptation of Assyrian art and culture. Iron also makes its appearance, but scantily. The pottery of the age of the inscriptions is related on the one side to the Assyrian pottery of the same period, and on the other to the pottery of Asia Minor. The polished red ware more especially points to the west.[136] [Illustration: THE RUINS OF A PALACE OF URARTU AT TOPRAK-KALEH.] The existence of a language of the Caucasian type in Armenia, and its association with a powerful kingdom and an advanced culture, is not the only revelation of the kind that we owe to cuneiform decipherment. We have learned that at a much earlier epoch Northern Mesopotamia was occupied by a people who spoke a language of similar type but of far more complicated form; and that here, too, the language in question was accompanied by a high civilization, a powerful monarchy, and the use of the cuneiform syllabary. The monarchy was that of Mitanni, and its culture and script had been borrowed from Babylonia in the age of Khammu-rabi, instead of from Assyria in the age of Assur-natsir-pal. But it is interesting to observe that in borrowing the script the people of Mitanni had adapted and simplified it in precisely the same way as did the people of Van in after days. Superfluous characters were discarded, a single phonetic value only assigned to each character, and large use made of those which expressed vowels. In fact, in both Mitannian and Vannic the system of writing begins to approach the alphabetic. Whether this similarity in adaptation was due to a similarity of phonetic structure in the two languages or to conscious imitation on the part of the Vannic scribes it is difficult to say; it is a point, however, which cannot be passed over.