 The arrival of such a population who spoke Proto-Armenian in the Armenian Highlands is assumed to have occurred around the time of the Bronze Age Collapse (sometime before c. 1200 BC).One of the theories about the emergence of Armenian in the region is that Paleo-Balkan-speaking settlers related to Phrygians (the Mushki and/or the retroactively named Armeno-Phrygians), who had already settled in the western parts of the region prior to the establishment of the Kingdom of Van in Urartu, had become the ruling elite under the Median Empire, followed by the Achaemenid Empire.The existence of Urartian words in the Armenian language and Armenian loanwords into Urartian suggests early contact between the two languages and long periods of bilingualism.