Armen E. Petrosyan
Šiuini – the name of the third great god of Urartu, should have been borrowed from a Hittite dialect, cf. Hitt. šiu- (šiuni, šiuanni, šiuna-) ‘god’, earlier: ‘sun god’, šiuatt- ‘daytime’ < *dyeu-, from the Indo-European name of the god of daylight sky. The consideration of this theonym as the Urartian parallel of the Hurrian sun god Šimigi is linguistically impossible (I. M. Diakonoff, V. V. Ivanov). The capital of Urartu Tušpa was the worship center of this god. The Armenian name of this city, Van, is derived from the declension form Bia(i)na of cuneiform Biainili, the name of royal domain and central land of the kingdom, where-ni is an Urartian suffix and -li a plural formant). It may be thought that in earliest times this region was inhabited by a Hittite speaking people.
Šiuini (to read: Siwini) is comparable to the name of the Armenian province of Siwnik‘ (< Siwini-yā, with Arm. plural formant k‘), where the largest concentration of toponyms derived from Arm. arew/areg ‘sun’ and traces of ancient cult of the sun god have survived. The local districts Vayoc‘ jor and Vaykunik‘ (Vay-ik-uni-k‘) are probably associated with the ethnonym of the ancient inhabitants of the East of the Lake Van, the Biai people (to read: Vyāy/Vǣy, which in Armenian reflected as Vay). This people of the Van region probably moved to Siwnik‘ in the beginning of the first millennium BC, under pressure of the Urartians.