Crossword-Solution: BITLIS 6 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 8

The shores of neither the Urmia nor the Van Lake were ever regularly occupied by Assyria, and, though Sargon certainly brought into his sphere of influence the kingdom of Urartu, which surrounded the latter lake and controlled the tribes as far as the western shore of the former, it is not proved that his armies ever went round the east and north of the Urmia Lake, and it is fairly clear that they left the northwestern region of mountains between Bitlis and the middle Euphrates to its own tribesmen.

Towards the north, probably, the route most used was that which is thought by many to be the line followed by Xenophon, first up the valley of the Tigris to Til or Tilleh, and then along the Bitlis Chai to the lake of Van and the adjacent country.

The province whereof it was the capital may perhaps have adjoined Arzanene, reaching as far north as the Bitlis river.

Early in the ensuing spring the indefatigable emperor again set his troops in motion, and, passing the lofty range which separates the basin of Lake Van from the streams that flow into the upper Tigris, struck that river, or rather its large affluent, the Bitlis Chai, in seven days from Salban, crossed into Arzanene, and proceeding westward recovered Martyropolis and Amida, which had now been in the possession of the Persians for twenty years.

Before the war the Armenians in the six Turkish vilayets--Trebizond, Erzeroum, Van, Bitlis, Mamuret-el-Aziz and Diarbekir--numbered perhaps 2,000,000, as compared with about 700,000 Turks.