a suitable name for the kingdom they ruled." Caught between expanding Urartu and Assyria, Nairi's existence as an independent entity ended in the early 8th-century BCE. In the mid-8th century BCE, part of Nairi is mentioned as an Assyrian province, while in the 7th century BCE, the term is occasionally used in Assyrian sources to refer to the province of Amedi (modern Diyabakır). Populations Albrecht Goetze suggested that what he refers to as the Hurriland dissolved into a number of small states that the Assyrians called Nairi. Others regard this hypothesis skeptically; for example, Warren C. Benedict points out that there is no evidence of the presence of Hurrians in the vicinity of Lake Van. The Nairi tribes may have been speakers of Proto-Armenian. According to Lorenzo D'Alfonso, the Nairi tribe Tuali may have moved west and founded the Iron Age neo-Hittite kingdom of Tabal. In Armenian culture Nairi (, Nayiri or ) is a poetic name of Armenia. It was notably used by the poets Vahan Terian and Yeghishe Charents as a synonym for Armenia. Yerkir Nairi (Land of Nairi) was the title of both Terian's collection of 18 poems written in the mid-1910s and a satirical novel by Charents, published in a complete volume in 1926. Terian wrote the poems while he was a student at the Saint Petersburg University's Department of Oriental Studies under Nicholas Marr, where he delved into ancient history. Terian successfully revived Nairi as an old name of Armenia. For Charents, Nairi is a national illusion. Critic Suren Aghababian described the novel as the cornerstone of Soviet Armenian prose. Another poet, born Hayastan Yeghiazarian, adopted Nairi Zarian as his pen name in the 1920s. It has since become a unisex name among Armenians. It is sometimes spelled as Nayiri or Nyree, while Nairuhi (Nayiruhi) and Naira are exclusively female names. It has also been used for various things, including institutions, localities, and products: Nairi Cinema, established in the 1920s, is Yerevan's oldest movie theater. (Land of Nairi) is a 1930 feature-length documentary directed by Hamo Beknazarian (Armenkino). Nayiri (Նայիրի) was a literary periodical, established by the writer Antranig Dzarugian in 1941. It was published in Aleppo, Syria until 1949 and in Beirut, Lebanon from 1951 to 1983. In Soviet Armenia, a village and a district were named Nairi in 1963 and 1972, respectively. The village was renamed in 1991, while the district, centered around