Nemrut (volcano) of the earliest trade routes. Two eruptions of Nemrut were probably witnessed by people of Urartu, an ancient state located in the eastern Turkey. These eruptions occurred c. 787 BC (period of King Menua) and c. 657 BC (period of King Rusa II), and the latter eruption might cause the sudden disappearance of the city Uaiais located 30 km east of Süphan. In the 1980s, Japanese volcanologists studied the evolution of gases inside the caldera of Nemrut. They found that the ratio of helium isotopes He/He is 1.06, which indicates volcanic activity (most of the measured helium evolved from the
Orontes II Mount Nemrut detailing the ancestry of Antiochus I Theos of Commagene mentions an ancestor whose name was incompletely preserved, and who was a son of Aroandas. This Aroandas (Orontes) is inferred to be the second ancestor of Antiochus listed in the inscriptions from Mount Nemrut who bore that name, succeeding the first Aroandas, who in turn was the son of Artasyrus and who married Rhodogune, the daughter of Artaxerxes II of Persia. Friedrich Karl Dörner and John H. Young (1996) interpreted the first preserved letter of the name of the son of Aroandas II as a delta, so that the