David March
Armenia and Its People from Prehistory to Modernity
David March | Armenia and Its People from Prehistory to Modernity
- Good evening, everyone, from London, and I hope you’ve had a pleasant summer. We are currently having a warm spell, and we have had a better summer than we thought a few months back. So this is part of a series that’s called “The Wars of Ottoman Succession 1918 to ‘24”. We’ve already done probably three or four lectures already, and what we’re looking at is everything that’s happened historically since the end of the first World War that are closely connected with the end of the Ottoman empire, the point being that so many of the important events, even currently, currently are happening, such as the Ukraine and Russia or Gaza and Israel, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Middle East, in general, that they all emanate from the same major event of the end of the Ottoman empire, and the real question is are there any connections? Are there any resonances? Because these conflicts are almost inevitably treated by most people as individual events which have no connection with each other. So that’s what a historian really does is looks for the bigger picture panning out, whereas a lot of political debate tends to zoom in to very narrow compasses without realising that there’s a bigger context. So today, we’re looking at Armenia from prehistory to 1500, and this is the first of three, in fact, possibly four talks about Armenia and the rise of the modern state of Turkey, and we started with Armenia because, actually, Armenia comes first before Turkey does, historically, and we will look at who the Armenians are. We will look at, next time, with the rise of modern Turkish culture, and the fact that Turkey was, in fact, a much more evolving state than is often considered to be the case. It wasn’t a at all. It was changing.
The third session, we will look at the Armenian genocide and how it happened, its causes, its structures, its consequences, and then there’ll be a fourth lecture on how the Western powers dealt with Turkey after the first World War. Because the interesting thing is that there’re being four multinational empires at war in central and eastern Europe during the first World War, that is Austria, Hungary, Russia, Turkey, and even, one could say, Germany, but perhaps you might not consider it to be a multinational empire. Consequential to the end of the first World War, the most successful state, the most stable state that emerged was Turkey, and Turkey’s performance in the first World War was much, much better and more formidable than any anyone would’ve ever thought. So that’s the sort of four lectures we’re going to do. So who are the Armenians? And we’re going to look at their origins and their history, but involved in this series, we’ve been looking at how to be a good historian so that when you come across people who want to talk about contentious events, there are ways in which we can test what they’re saying and, also, understand a wider and deeper picture. So there are new methods. This is something, I think, that’s probably new to a lot of people, is there are new methods in understanding ancient societies, and, in fact, I went to Cambridge studies in the late '70s, and in ancient history, there were new methods to understand the Roman and Greek societies that involved a lot more than just reading, you know, the usual canon, the usual texts, because all of these societies had a history going back beyond the point at which literature was written down, and so this was also new methods of understanding the past, which, actually, has accelerated since the '70s as we’ll see in a minute.
I’m talking about archaeology and DNA and linguistics and the like. We’ll be looking at how to test historical claims to nation, national statehood because, in a sense, we say that nations are invented. They’re not entirely invented. What they are is the narrative develops over time, and it is a bit of a look back from the present to the past and what we make of it, and people try to make claims that, you know, a certain nation existed at a particular time, when, in fact, we find that those claims are tendentious, and we’re reviewing such claims that make conflict in the post Ottoman world, and I’m thinking, in particular, of Palestinians, Israelis or Jewish nation, Ukrainians, and Russians. So this is nations from prehistory to modernity. All nations have something called primordial or perennial backgrounds. They are ethnic groups by definition, but they have shadowy… They have left shadowy vestiges in the past of who or what they were. Sometimes, you know, we don’t know when they came into existence. So part of this lecture is about looking at the Armenians and trying to identify when they came into being. Nations are self-identifying historical groups, and this, we’ll look at in a minute, was given shake by historians and philosophers, like Gottfried Herder, who was a German philosopher who set off looking at mankind as a group of nations rather than the French approach, which is to look at mankind and look at mankind as some kind of universal group, where the national characteristics were not so important. So what I’ve listed here is… And we can use this list to look at the Armenians. In fact, we can use this list to look at everyone as to how society’s evolved, and the first one is, I think quite an interesting one, 'cause the first kind of organised groups that we find are nomad raiders and what I call overlords, the chaotic impacts of self-defined overlords who have military muscle but, also, have protection services to offer local settled agricultural communities.
So for instance, in Russia, the Rus’ , the original Russians, were, in fact, Vikings from Scandinavia. They were coming down the major rivers in Russia in order to trade with Byzantium. They were Swedes. They were not Slavs, but they set up the first Rus’ Kievan state, but the kind of base populations are all Slavic dwellers who originated from northwest kind of Poland and Russia and the Baltic, but it is the Viking Scandinavian element of the Rus’ and their overlordship is a typical example. When we come to look at the Armenians and the Turks, later on, you’ll find that these nomad raiders appear later on in the story of Armenia and Turkey. Okay, and so once you get settled states, you get empires, and empires are the main means of government in history until the last century. Where you have a centralised authority, you get languages and written evidence because they’re administering the state, which almost always means registering tax, and what is being produced. These centralised empires have a military purpose. They are administered or run by military elites, and apart from the central area, you have provinces and colonies, and so we know about these, if you know anything about the Bible, the Persians, the Assyrians, the Romans, the Greeks, and this is the main, I would say, the main model for European history. You do occasionally get slightly more specific independent nations states, such as city states, which are often kingdoms, or they become republics. They’re often run by oligarchs. There’s probably even more ruled by tyrants, and the Greek city states are really a model of the city state, which later gets transferred over to the Roman city state, but then, of course, the Roman city state then becomes an empire.
If you look at the Greek city states, Athens, for instance, was a model, was a successful maritime power who, eventually, found further colonies, and then actually creates the Athenian empire, which leads to its downfall. Other city states or the main opponent to Athens was Sparta, which is an agricultural military rather than maritime power who actually end up ruling Greece in the stead of Athens until the rise of the empire of Alexander. Whenever I go to Greece, I went to Greece a couple weeks ago, I often say to people that the British upper classes always talk about the Athenians because of their culture and their philosophy and their statues and all the rest of it, but, in fact, it’s Sparta, and its leadership is really the model for European history, because European history becomes militaristic and, primarily, a powerful control over other people. Then you get kingdoms that are more limited, such as the Davidic kingdoms in Israel or in England, the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, but the predominant organisation of history in Europe is the empire. Okay, so then we get republics. Rome was a republic before it became an empire, and it is a republican period, which is a model for looking at the finer aspects of civics in Europe, such as government organisation, officials who run the state rhetoric and law court practise. So all of that, later on, becomes available to renaissance Italy, in particular, the Florence of the Renaissance and the whole issue there is how does a state that’s not run by a king but run by a group of people, how does it manage power? And, very often, you have an element of citizenship, but you have controlled by oligarchs or even tyrants. Then the next… Sorry, I’m going to have to kill that one.
Okay, so in the more early modern period, we have commonwealths, which, later, will evolve into democracies, and I’m thinking here, actually, of the Dutch in the 1550s, in the 80-year war against the Spanish, the English Civil War, the Polish Commonwealth, which was a massive organisation totally in the control of the local gentry and nobility, and the United States all fall into what is often called the Atlantic civilization, where, essentially, the power of a state is run by parliament that is answerable to more local bodies, such as constituencies or, in Holland, what are called the states, and in Poland, the commonwealth parliament, the Sejm, is entirely controlled by the nobles, such that the basic principle was that any noble who didn’t like any proposal could put a veto on the entire exercise, and the United States, of course, which is very much like a British Republic or commonwealth or a Dutch states general, which is an example, actually an extraordinary example of a state that is completely invented by convention and has no predecessor on the continent of America, and then, of course, today, we get modern nation states that are a hotpot of tyrannies, military dictators, one-party states, oligarchies, and democracies. The democracies are probably, by far, the smallest group, and it just goes to prove that things don’t change much. So that’s kind of like the background to history and how people organise themselves and how they exist in states, and this is a little playing around here with looking at what do you do when you look backwards and forwards?
Because if you look backwards, you are looking at a recession, going back where the inputs are actually getting wider and wider the further back you go, and as time approaches where you are, you become more defined, but the actual background to you, so if you want to look at your history, you’re actually going to be looking at more and more and more of different aspects of your past, and then if you take today and you want to look forward to the future, your succession, it gets wider and wider and wider, and the reason why I say this is because when we look at national identity, which, often, is quite narrowly defined in the modern times, it actually is the product of a much wider amount of human activity and history, which is why, often, the historical explanations of where you are today are not really true. Okay, so let’s look at what Herder said in the 18th century about nationhood and what happens when we rediscover and reinvent our primordial or perennial origins, and he said, basically, that there were four back aspects to your background. There is a common descent or an ethnic group, there’s a common language, there’s a defined piece of land, and there’s a common history, and then looking forward, we have a common destiny question mark, which may be rooted in what happened in the past, but that’s entirely synthetic, and it’s definitely invented. Now, the interesting thing about Herder nationalism is that, modern history has looked into the past as Gottfried Herder sort of looked at it, and we have all sorts of modern science techniques that really do help us to look to the past, and there’s this, this professor, Colin Renfrew, who you can see on the podcasts on YouTube, is really a key writer since the ‘80s and '90s on the rediscovery of prehistory, which, interesting enough, coincided with the fall of the Soviet Union and people rediscovering their national roots, and this, the techniques of looking at the past are listed here.
So one of the things that we… There’s a lot more geography or geology in history is we’re going to see. Renfrew was an archaeologist. So we’d known quite a lot about that for some time, but the techniques of looking at archaeology and what we dig up have improved massively. Linguistics tells us a lot about the origin of our language, which language groups were our ancestors and how we can use linguistics to see how the contents or the structure or the words used in the language can lead us back to a wide variety of origins. We’ll also be looking at the genetic DNA areas, which, again, allow us to find out where people came from, who are they similar to, and who are they different from, and that very much deals with the untrue suggestion that we have single, very defined DNAs for each nation. You’ll find that, as we’ll see in a minute, the genetic underpinning of a nation can be quite varied. Material sciences, well, nowadays, we’re interested to know where materials come from. I mean, an aspect of modernity is materials are really important. I mean, people are very interested in materials at the moment because it’s essential to the computer industry. So special metals, where they come from, and their impact upon history and the present and the future is a whole area of engineering and natural science. So for instance, Alexander the Great’s always been considered to be an impressive figure until they found out in the 1980s, in fact, in the 1970s, that it wasn’t Alexander the Great who was the key to the story of Alexander the Great. It was, in fact, his father Philip II who discovered a mountain of silver about 20 miles away from Pella, and that, in fact, Pella had become the Athens of the North based upon this discovery of material sciences, and we do find it in history, the impact of the discovery of metals does explain what happened, and, also, give the explanation as to why empires rise and fall.
Cultural studies, I won’t go into that so much, but historical models are really important, because, certainly, when I was around as a student in the late '70s, people were studying ancient societies by using or trying to construct models, economic models, cultural models, that would show, for instance, if you looked at the Roman Republic, how did Rome take over the rest of Italy? What was the manpower available to the Republican generals who were fighting against each other? What was the class structure, so where did wealth come from? Because Rome went from a republic to an empire where you had a real big division between extremely wealthy upper classes and generals and the rest of the Republicans who found themselves having lost out, and, in fact, the, the on the statistical side, people were dealing with very, very scanty data, which have now been improved. So there’s a guy called Peter Brunt who wrote a wonderful book called “Italian Manpower”, 200 BC to 0, in which he tried to reconstruct the demography of the Roman republic, and so that’s a prime example of a demographer coming in and helping the classist who might before had just looked at Latin books. Another guy called Keith Hopkins tried to apply statistical methods, largely by saying, “Well, what numbers do we have at the moment? How would you treat the area of uncertainty so that we might be able to say, 'Well, we are pretty sure that there was, I don’t know, circulation of coins of a certain volume in the first century BC, and it could only be, really, not less than this and not more than that.’” So people are trying to reconstruct ancient societies.
Of course, what people also did was to look at other societies in Africa and Asia and where you had similar geographies and, even possibly, similar histories, and to see if we could actually put those models into the system to understand how Greece and Rome occupied. So that’s a pretty long introduction to the Armenians, but I think, hopefully, you’ll get an idea as to where I’m coming from, and, in fact, we can use these ideas to look at anyone, any nations, and we can use it on the Turks. We can use it on Palestinians or on Israelis and Jews. There is, in fact, a book that’s written by an academic at the SOAS in London, which is called “Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History”, which is an interesting book that I haven’t yet read, I have to say, but I’m going to, in which it’ll be interesting to see how does a Palestinian historian link back 4,000 years, when, you know, we have a political situation where some people think that the Palestinians haven’t really existed except in some other form and have only existed in the current form from 1964. So again, it’s the extension backwards that is an interesting activity. Okay, so geography and topography, understanding the geography of a country, its topography, its geographical social-economic situation is key. So this is a picture of a relief picture of Turkey, and if you kind of like, you know, if you can see my cursor here, if you put a line just going down there, then going right, and then underneath the lake on the right is Armenia, and what you’ll notice is how mountainous it is. There are very few lowland areas. What is interesting is that you’ve got, up here in the Caucasus, this massive range of mountains that include the highest mountain in Europe, about 18,000 feet, I think it’s called Mount Elbrus, but in Armenia, the highest is Mount Ararat, and that’s about 16,000 feet high. There are other almost equally high mountains, and so the Armenians, as they eventually emerge, are a mountain people.
You’ll find that the Armenians do actually spread out from what is called historical Armenia. So that, for instance, if you look down here, there was a kingdom of Cilicia, which is a lowland area that later becomes an independent kingdom. If you look further up here, you have only lowland areas on the Caspian and on the Black Sea, and if you go to the other end of Turkey, you’ll find that it’s only in the left, the Western Coast of Turkey that you have lowland areas, which are very often settled by mixed populations of Turks and Greeks. So this explains why the means to survive and, also, they are successful survivors of many different empires that have passed through Turkey, because they live in a very high area. So this is another map that shows you the relief, and you can see how the relief shows the highest areas are in Armenia, which are over six and a half, what it says here, over… What does that say? Over 2,000 metres, but I mean you are talking here about mountains of over 5,000 metres with valleys that pass through lower valleys, but this whole area to the right of where my cursor is is often called historic Armenia. So let’s just look at the next. That’s not a very helpful, particularly helpful. It’s just a more colourful picture. This is a very good picture of historic Armenia. The orange is greater Armenia. The Armenians then create a kingdom called the Cilician Kingdom in the 1200, 1300s, which, of course, you can see on the coast, and is, therefore, a very important part of the spread of Armenians who are actually millions of Christians, and they become part of the story of how Christian Europe and its crusades come through this area and down into Syria, into Jerusalem. There’s this concept of Byzantine Armenia, which I have to say, doesn’t really figure that much, I think, in the story, unless I’ve missed something.
If you look at greater Armenia, you’ll see that there is a lighter area called Soviet Armenia, which is, actually, part of Armenia that the Turks took before 1875 and were always, therefore, Russian in the story, and survived later on as Soviet Armenia, and then they become the Armenia that we know today, and then there’s a mention here of Woodrow Wilson’s boundary for the Treaty of Sevres in 1920, which is probably difficult to see, but my cursor is kind of like following the line, which is under Woodrow Wilson’s intentions for Armenia. The independent Armenian state that would’ve been established under the United, well, under the League of Nations had his proposals gone forward. In fact, I think I’m probably right in saying if you follow the cursor, the line goes up south of Tabriz, and then up through the corner of Karabagh and up to the the Black Sea. I think that is the boundary. Okay, so here’s another map of the Armenia that Woodrow Wilson would’ve created. Okay, so what we’ve seen is that Turkey is a very large country, and it’s kind of like three times the size of the UK. I think it’s the largest state in Europe outside of Russia. Only 3% is flat, 40% is very mountainous, and the flat parts are on the coast. Armenia is even more mountainous, with Ararat at 5,000 metres, and it is really the headwaters for three major rivers, the Artaxes, which feeds into the Caspian and Tigris and the Euphrates, which go down through Syria, as we all know, into Mesopotamia. Therefore it’s a landlocked area. Okay, now, I’ve got here something called onomastics.
You might not have heard of this, but we can tell quite a lot about a country depending upon its names. So if you look at this list of places in Western Anatolia, the word Ottoman doesn’t come from a particular geographical area. It’s the name of a dynasty of Turks, and I think what you’ve got to understand about the Ottoman empire is that it is a dynasty, a military dynasty that is a foreign overlord of what is called Anatolia. Anatolia is actually a Greek word, and it means the land of the rising sun, which, you know, from a Greek point of view is the case, and then we’ve got various famous names like Bosphorus, which is actually Oxford in Greek, cattle crossing. I don’t quite know how that works really ‘cause the Bosphorus is quite wide, but I might be wrong somewhere in…. But there we got Byzantium, which is based on the Greek king Byzas whose real name is Mr. He-Goat. We got Constantinople, which is based on the Roman emperor Constantine, who identified the city previously known as Byzantium as the second capital, the Eastern capital of the Roman empire. Interesting about Constantine is that he was actually elected emperor, or should I say the army appointed him as an emperor in York. So you know, the Yorkshire mob can claim some importance in the appointment of Constantine, and then, of course, the Western Anatolian areas that we saw are substantially populated by Greeks, particularly along the Agean literal, and from a Muslim point of view, these people are called the Rum, which is just another way of saying the Romans, and that gives you an idea of how a Ottoman will look at Turkey, and that it is a a Muslim dynastic military empire.
Okay, here are some toponyms from Armenia, which is all rather fun. Armenia, where does the word Armenia come from? Well, it comes from the Hebrew and Aramaic, which is not surprising, because Armenia sits at the top of the Euphrates, and as we all know in the Tigris and the Euphrates, as we know from the Haggadah, if you read the Haggadah, Passover, there’s a reference to that Aramean was my father, and Aramean or Aram, also, has the meaning of being a mountainous, high country from which the rivers flow. There is a group of early north Semitic people called the Arameans These are people, very often, that we don’t have a lot of information on. We have the language of Aramaic, which is what I call the demotic language of the Arab Middle East and the Jewish Middle East, then we have like the Caucasus. I like this one. This is a Sythian name. Sythians were one of the early major empires that we’re looking at in a minute, and the Caucasus means an ice shining or a white with snow as reported by the Roman historian, Pliny, because, of course, that’s exactly what they did. Cilicia down on the South Coast, which later becomes an Armenian empire, means goat hair, because they actually produce a very hard material, goat hair, used for boat sails and for weapons. The river Euphrates, for instance, I mean the names in the various languages are very similar. So the Armenians call it Yeprat, Persia calls it Ufratu, and it all means fast moving or easy to cross, and the Hebrew is Prat. There’s a city in Armenia called Ezerum that actually comes from the Arabic Arzan al-Rum, using the word of al-Rum, the Romans, from the 10th century the land of the Romans. I think it’s always interesting to know when you look at the Euphrates and the Tigris and Abraham’s story.
The word Hebrew itself comes from lvri, which means a cross of rivers. This is a major part of the story of Abraham is he crosses rivers, and then goes south towards what would’ve been called Palestine Egypt. The word Tigris, arrow fast running water, Persian, Tigra, Armenian, Dglat, Hebrew, Hiddekel, which is very similar, linguistically, to the previous words, and then we have the Kingdom of Urartu, which was the first major kingdom of the Armenians. It’s other name in modern terms would’ve been the kingdom of fan Van, and it just means a place, but, of course, Urartu is connected with the name of the Mountain Ararat, and so there’s all sorts of different kind of names that suggest different influences on the origins of Armenia, reflecting the various influences of invasion, settlement, dispersal. Okay, so here’s the star of Armenia. I thought I’ll put that in, too. Just ask oneself where that came from. So let’s look at the historic footprint. So this is a very good map of the whole Armenian story, and what you’ve got here in the light brown is the largest extent of the Tigran empire of the last century of the Armenian, the kingdom of Tigran, and you can see that it extends all the way from the Caucasus down through to Syria. You’ve got the Cilician kingdom here, which in the Crusader period of the 12th and 30th century was an independent kingdom. You’ve got something called historic Armenia, which is the heavy dotted lined area, which is considered to be the central area of Armenia, and then we’ve got here the Armenia of today, which is the successor to the czarist provinces that exists today as an independent state.
The rest is in various countries’ jurisdictions, and then we’ve got, again, the Wilsonian proposed if you were to follow the green dotted line is a substantial area. Okay, so then let’s look at the Turkish empire and where does that fit into? How does Armenia fit into the Turkish empire story? Well, if you look here, you’ll find that the purple is the last areas to be occupied by the Turkish empire between 1566 when the Westwood expansion stopped and 1700, and you could see a considerable amount of the Caucasus, and Azerbaijan was taken by the Turks. The green part of Armenia is 1520 to 1566, and then there’s the area there, which is of a slightly greenish, light greenish, which is part of Turkey that was taken by the Turks between 1480 and 1520. Of course, in order to explain the story, you will realise that when it comes to the Armenian genocide and what happens is that the inhabitants of what you call historic Armenia are expelled into what is now here called Syria and these lighter green areas, and we’re going to see what the consequences were later. So here are the six provinces of Armenia that are the subject of the later genocide, and this area was identified in 1878 when he governments got together as a result of the czarist invasion of 1877 to 1878. This is the area that is referred to as Armenia and where, in the treaty, brought great power decision making to the end of that conflict. Special guarantees were to be provided to this area and to treat Armenia as a special case, and, of course, as we’re seeing in the next lecture or two, those measures were never implemented.
Okay, so let’s just look at what we can tell about Armenia and what this says is that there are whole succession of ancient cultures that we can identify as the background to the Armenia that we know today, and so, for instance, we got here something called the Kurgan culture. If you look at the battle of Stalingrad, much of the fighting in Stalingrad in 1942 to ‘44 was around the Kurgan, which is a massive hill with a barrow on the top, and the Kurgan culture actually spread throughout Russia and Ukraine and can be identified as having spread, at that time, which is 6000-5500 BC to Western Europe. So the Barrow cultures of UK are linked back to the Kurgan culture, then we’ve got here, which is very important here, the Kura-Araxes culture, which is actually along the Kura-Araxes rivers that go east west at the top of Armenia and define the Armenia plateau, and then we’ve got, before that, all these other sort of cultures that have been identified as existing in the area. Now, what is the real explanation for Armenia is that this is what I call the Route 60, 66, Route 69 of much of European history, which is that the steps that originate in Mongolia and proceed westward to Europe is a flat grassland that is really the highway along which many of the invaders of Europe proceed over time.
So the most obvious two that I can think of are, firstly, during the Roman empire, when you have the invasion of Europe by Goths and Vandals and Huns and the like, that they are being pushed along this highway probably by other groups of peoples who are behind them, and when you look at the decline for the Roman empire, Vandals invasion of Europe, the destruction of Rome, and the establishment of most of the countries in Europe, and they are tribes that’s originated from this superhighway and this movement of nations is a major issue for the Roman empire in order to absorb them. They often try to acculturate them and even form treaties with these nations, but, eventually, the pressure is too great, and the Roman empire in the West fails to contain them. Of course, in the East, it’s a different story because the Byzantine empire manages to survive for another 1,000 years, but if we look, therefore, at the Caucasus Mountains, and Malagazirt, for instance, which is the date in 1071 when the Turks invade Armenia and Turkey and is, I said, to take over the Turkish peninsula or the Turkish area, they will come along the steps and down over the Caucasus and then into Turkey. Okay, well, this is an example where the Kurgan cultures, if you look at this, you can see how the steps are a source of backwards and forwards going around areas, and then going into Central Western Europe, and that’s not a desperately helpful map, but it gives you the impression as to what’s really going on for Turkey and for the Armenians.
Okay, so this is a list of all the different empires that existed from 2500 onwards listed on the left, and then the invaders of Turkey and areas such as Armenia on the right, and the list on the right is much more relevant to Armenian history 'cause you’ll find that the Armenia that we know today or the historic Armenia, we can trace the history of the response to Persian invasions, which are largely accommodation so that the court rituals, the ruling powers, and the satraps within Armenia are of a Persian or Medic nature, and the great families that rule Armenia from 600 onwards as appointees of the Persians and the Medes display all the cultural linguistic aspects of the Persian empire, and then we have the impact of the Greeks with Alexander, which replaces the Persian influence and, later, leads to the foundation of the Armenian church and, linguistically, Armenian language that is considered to be largely Greek. The next major invasion is the Arabs in 645, which completely destroys… Well, it doesn’t completely destroy, but it’s an important point in time because the Arabs then import other cultures or other groups such as Kurds and Turks, who, for the first time, actually settle in Armenia and the Turkish area Anatolia, whereas, before, all of these previous empires had… But, well, what they’d do is they’d formed treaty treaties with the local Armenians.
The Armenians may have taken on the characteristics of these people, but there was no major settlements, but it was with the Arabs that we begin to get major settlements, and then, of course, the Turks arrive in 1064, which is the major resettlement of Anatolia, and then having had a period of Turkish settlement, we have the Mongols who are a Turkic group, who, in 1241, in the form of the Golden Horde, smash the existing Armenian and Turkish areas in a very highly destructive way that we often known that group as the Tamerlane or the Timur, Tamerlane the Great Mongol invasions, which not only you destroy Turkey and Anatolia substantially, but also destroy the states of Kievan Rus’ and the Russians, the Kievan Russians, not the Muscovite Russians. The Muscovite Russians managed to accommodate themselves by paying tax and tribute to the Golden Horde, the Mongols, but the rest of Ukraine and Western Russia is subject to direct Mongol control but only for a short period of couple of centuries, because these invaders are an unstable group of overlords, and over time, for instance, you know, people like Tamerlane, they arrive, they smash up the existing states, and then they go back and die, and it’s not… Then this is not a stable, in the long-term sense, settlement. Okay, so there are some various maps here that you can look at later as these various cultures that are in Turkey and in Armenia. What about, you know, where the Armenians come from? There are three distinct sources of information about the Armenians.
I’m going to carry on, by the way, ‘til 8:00. There’s the Jewish Biblical Christian explanation because, of course, the Bible is full of references to Mount Ararat where the Ark settles, and it references to an Aramite father, which means that someone who comes from the high country, and it says that the descendants of Japheth are the sons of Noah, and they will settle in Eastern Turkey and then down into Mesopotamia, and if we pick that up later, the first major historian of the Armenians called Moses of Khoren in the fifth century AD, it goes a lot into that Biblical origin that is in the Old Testament in the Book of Genesis, then there are Greek theories of Armenian origins. Of course, as you can tell, you know, this is why we say that history is so full of comings and goings is that everyone’s got an explanation, and the major historians of the Greeks refer to either Greeks coming through Anatolia into Armenia, which is what Herodotus says or Strabo, who’s another major historian, says that the Armenians come from middle of Anatolia, what’s called Phrygia, and from the South, the Zagros Mountains, which is towards Syria, and then, and then Xenophon, who, his book on the great Persian expedition of 400, describes how, by that time, there are Armenians who had absorbed the preexisting populations, and that he describes the interaction of the 10,000 in the Greek army as they try to make their way to the Black Sea in order to escape from a slightly aborted expedition against the Persian existing emperors and kings. Okay, so the up-to-date version is as typical with linguistics and modern academics is there’s really a bit of a mishmash of explanations saying either these people came from Thrace and Phrygia or they might be original inhabitants who absorbed outside influences.
I mean, this is all pretty obvious that there’s these various possibilities, but one thing that can be said from a linguistics point of view is that Armenian is part of the Indo-European language tree. It is a unique branch and is on the Greek side, and in terms of culture, there are images on the Persian monuments depicting Armenians as similar to other Caucasus people. So the Armenians are not a different set of people. There is, by that time of the Persian empire, a settled culture of the Armenians, which is similar to the surrounding populations. Now, when we come to DNA studies, there is a DNA project, which you can see on YouTube, and there are some interesting points here which is worth investigating. DNA investigations show groups of people who share the same development of their DNA, in particular, mutations, and we can, therefore, divide the world up, not into people who have different blood but people who have similar, they share similar mutations in their chromosomes, and what the current study decided was that, in fact, there is no single Armenian genetic profile, but it is a combination of these different clusters of mutations. What that means is that there is a distinctive group of Armenians, but it’s because they all share similar mutations. There’s not, you know, one DNA that explains a particular country. The other conclusions are that the Armenians, probably by 15,000 BC, had become a settled population between 10,000 and 15,000 years BC. They had become a settled population where you didn’t have people joining and leaving or some mishmash of people… The changes to the population being caused by joiners and leavers, but that there was a single population, and it says here, there’s a great deal of genetic stability over the past 3,000 years.
The difference between these two points is the second point there about autochthonous root, which means locals, people being settled, is that there wasn’t a massive arrival and departure. What the next point says is that, because people’s DNA is changing all the time, that the DNA has settled to a common profile from 3000 BC. So let’s just look at… This is a very interesting diagram, because it shows groups that share the same DNA mutations and profiles, and you’ll see, not surprisingly, really, the Iraqi Jews, the Iranian Jews, the Azerbaijani Jews, they’ve all got similar genetic profiles. The Turks and Armenians have their own cluster, but they are slightly different from, well, they are distinct from the Jewish groups. We’ve got here Syrians and Georgians, which are distinct groups of settled DNA cultures. We’ve got a Lebanese group here that crosses over with the Palestinian group, but it is worth seeing here that the Palestinian DNA groups are quite distinct and separate, apart from sharing with Lebanese and are quite distinct from the Syrian DNA group. So what does that tell us? Well, it tells us that we can see that there are different… Different groups have common DNA characteristics. Does that tell us anymore? Well, it’s important when we find that there aren’t crossovers, and it is interesting that the Turks and Armenians do crossover with the Georgian Jews, possibly, but, also, the Iranians, but not with the Georgians and not with the Palestinians or the Yemenis. So let’s just look at history. I know we’re almost finished, but… So how do we kind of like understand Armenian history?
And what you’ve got to understand that there were periods of time when the Armenians were independent and had some kind of power, and these were, as I’ve highlighted here in yellow, quite a lot during the 1,000 years before the year 0 plus 100 years. So yeah, including an important empire called the Tirgranic empire, but all three of the first three categories here do have a large level of independence subject to the occasional incursion by empires, such as the Babylonian and Persian empire, between Urartu and the Seleucid empire, and after the year 0, the next period of independence is largely in the kingdom of Cilicia, which, as you saw, is on the Southern Coast of Turkey, where the Armenians had formed a population that then became allied to the Christian Crusaders at that time. All of these history is then collapsed at the time of the Turkic and Mongol hordes and overlords, which then leads to the foundation of the Turkish empire, and that really is a summary of everything else that we could say, and the slides will go take you through. There’s lots of maps here. So the original kingdom of Urartu shows us that that was a successful kingdom, because they stopped the Assyrians from advancing into Asia Minor, the Caucasus, and Northern Persia.
One of the aspects of Armenia is that the metals, iron, copper are really important for their economic survival, and we can see this particular kingdom existed because we can see what was built. So let’s have a look at the Persian and Greek empires. I mean, basically, Armenia survives by entering into treaties with whoever is the top empire at the time, and Armenia pays tribute in horses and silver, Listen, let me just show you. We get a mention of the Kurds, or called the Kharduchoi, in Armenia at the time of the Greek expedition, and, again, horses come up quite a lot. Okay, Alexander the Great, he doesn’t actually go and invade Armenia. He goes past, it because it is too high. You know, why do you want to invade a country that’s very high? There is said to be a large Armenian contingent in the Persian army that were resisting Alexander’s advance into Persia, and it is really, as you would expect with Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic period, it is Alexander the Great that turns the Armenians from being a Persian type society in terms of its court, language, its administration, and its political administration through Satraps. It is Alexander that predictably changes Armenia from a Persian to a Hellenistic or Greek culture.
Okay, so the Seleucid empire, which was a Greek successor state, ruled by the generals that succeeded Alexander, during that period, we see the establishment of cities that gave shape to the greater Armenia that we know previously, and I think what’s interesting about that is that, you know, the Greeks, as we said earlier on, were really past masters of the city state as being the most natural local form of government and identity, and so when Alexander, wherever he goes, he found cities, and that’s what his successors do, and this is where the Greek Armenia can be seen by the considerable building that goes on as part of greater Armenia. We also see evidence of the first survey of Armenia being marked by boundary stones, which, again, is very much a kind of a building exercise, a project. Okay, so we’ve seen that. Okay, so we have the great independent kingdom of Tigran, a brief period when the Armenian empire reached its greatest extent. You can look at the slides later. As you can see here, the Greek, sorry, the Armenian upper classes has become colonised. The great capital was at Tigranakert, which is now part of Armenia, which is, again, part of the foundation of cities. There are mints, which is very much a Greek exercise in creating coins, a standing army, no mercenaries. Okay, and then, of course, the Greek Hellenistic period is brought to an end by the Roman emperor, Vespasian in 100 AD. So Armenia, under Roman rule, becomes a strong state in the third century when the Roman empire is struggling in what is called the crisis of the third century, and, in particular, it’s is struggling to contain the Parthians and the Persians in the East.
So you’ll always find that Armenia actually asserts its transient independence when the other empires are either at war with each other, and there is no supreme overlord empire to which the Armenians must accommodate. The Christianity of Armenia comes about as a result of its Hellenization, and, in fact, the Armenian church was the first church to be founded as a formal organisation, and it could be said that, and that was before the conversion of Constantine to Christianity, and it can be said that it is the Christian religion of Armenia, which becomes a fundamental and persistent state and national structure that gives Armenia the ability to survive. Armenian language, interesting enough, Armenian language was invented in the fifth century. I can’t really go into that in very much detail, but it’s a script that’s supposed to be similar to Aramaic, although I’m not an expert on that, then we get the Arab conquest of the seventh century AD, and, as you would expect, the Armenia that manages to resist the Arab invasions are those who live in the mountains, and Armenia has the ability to absorb and to resist because it is divided into very small units because of the nature of the geography, then if we go into post 1075, the Cilician kingdom, which actually forms not only an outpost of Western crusader power in the area but, also, provides the ability of Western and Europe and the Latin countries to have some impact upon Armenia, and to give an example of how this sort of works its way through is that the founding king, Levon and his family, he doesn’t live very long, and then the kingdom gets… The kings go through a series of generations, and it ends up as part of the heritage of the kings of Savoy in Italy, which just shows you how Armenia was beginning to connect up with Western Europe, and that will become very important, because the story of the Armenians, at this time, is that Armenians are spreading out and becoming part of the trading system of Turkey, the Silk Road, as it’s called, and banking houses, trading is run by Armenian traders, and there is the establishment of Armenians in Constantinople. So that when we come to look, later on, to the modern history of Armenia and the genocide, you’ve got to understand that the people who are the main victims of the genocide are, in fact, the rural inhabitants of historic Armenia.
So let’s see, we’re almost finished now, yes, the reasons for the end of the Cilician kingdom is the invasion of the Mongols and the Turks, and that is the beginning of Armenian decline. It is interesting to think that the Silk Road, of which the Armenians had become part, was closed following the invasion of the Mongols and the Turk, what they call the Turk men tribes, and it’s exactly at that point that Western Europe starts to explore alternative roots to China through Columbus and Da Gama and the whole area or the age of exploration. So that’s really the story of Armenia. What we’re going to do next time is look at the rise of modern Turkey up to the first World War, and then we will bring these two strands together when we look at the Armenian genocide as to why it happened. So can I hand back to, is it Karen?
It’s Hannah, Hannah.
Sorry.
That’s okay.
Anna, sorry, Anna. Anna?
Hannah. We’ll go through some questions?
Yeah.
Q&A and Comments:
Q - [Hannah] So first comment is from David saying, “Asian societies seem to be largely homogenous, whereas Western countries are heterogeneous, immigration plays a huge role in the latter, whereas restricted policies seem to drive the former. Your opinion, please.”
A - Oh, that’s a big question, isn’t it? I think it’s certainly true to say, I mean, you only have to look at Europe in terms of its national structures that Europe is a massively mosaic type continent, and its histories and its localities are part of its history. So for instance, if you look at Italy, you’ve got to understand that Italy, well, it’s called a national state. It’s the locality that is where the people live and is the real kind of explanation of why Italy is such a fragmented country. So I dunno if that answers the question, but I mean, if you look at, you know, India and China, I mean, these are massive empires, really, and the real question is how far does locality impact upon China and India at the state level?
We have a question-
All the conflicts of the 20th century in Europe are one part of Europe trying to grab parts of the other or trying to wipe out, you know, the next country or to, yes, to annex, annex. So yeah, I agree.
Q - [Hannah] We have Catarina saying, “Please differentiate between Rus’ and Russia. Russia was not created until centuries after Kiev Rus’, which is now Ukraine.”
A - Yes, okay, well, that’s absolutely correct that the original Russian state, if you want to call it, is called Kievan Rus’, but it’s a Byzantine Scandinavian crossing point, and the church is, obviously, directly comes from the Greek Orthodox church or the Bulgarian Orthodox church. Muscovy is an entirely separate part of Russia, and it just so happens that because of the Mongol invasions, the Kievan Rus’ is wiped out, but the Muscovite part of the Russian, you know, civilization survives and now are two entirely separate… Well, they’re actually separate ends of a connected system, ‘cause the whole point about the Swedes and the Rus’ and the Muscovite was that they sold goods from Northern Europe through Kiev to Byzantium and vice versa. So the point is the story of Kiev and of Moscow is an interconnected story, and you can’t differentiate the two. I think these attempts to say that one side is more important than another simply isn’t relevant to the picture, which is one of interconnection. What I would say, for instance, is that, I know this is a controversial point, that those who say, for instance, that Putin has created some imaginary historical explanation as to why the Russians are entitled to invade Kiev Rus’, well, I think, you know, whether or not they’re entitled to invade or not is actually a much more local question about how the Americans and Europe and the Russians settled yet the Soviet empire, and I think it doesn’t necessarily show that the Europeans are in the right, but there is a point to what Putin says, which is the interconnectedness of Muscovy and Kiev is something that I think the West hasn’t handled properly.
Q - [Hannah] Shelly asks, “How did Jews fit into this model? The land base is gone for 2,000 to 2,500 years, not one language, just a group of people held together by being scapegoated?”
A - Yeah, that’s a very good question. I mean, I think looking at Armenian history, what we’ve just looked at just now and the Jewish history, you know, has some interesting resonances and comparisons and contrasts. The Jews always are an exception, for some reason. What we’ll do later on in the series is look at, you know, issues of Jewish DNA, dispersion, conquest. It’s the same story that the point is that if the Jews had lived in… You know, if the Jews had lived in a land that was as high as the Armenian central plateau, the Jews would’ve… Would they have survived? I mean, let’s face it. The Armenians did not really survive the Turkish genocide, but, you know, there’s no question. The Armenians have lived in the Armenian plateau continuously for 3,000 years. The Jews were… I mean, the whole issue of how the Roman empire managed to completely destroy and disperse the Jewish people is something… I mean, I’ve looked at some of the books. It might be that I haven’t really looked deeply into it, but I think it’s an element of the story that is almost unique. I mean, for instance, Rome completely destroyed Carthage and the Punic culture, and Rome completely destroyed the Jews. These are genocides. They are ethnic cleansings in modern terms. What are the similarities? I think there’s quite a lot there. You know, the Armenians survive largely because they began to disperse, and they became specialists in trade and finance and the like. Well, that’s a very Jewish kind of story. Yeah.
[Hannah] Lorna’s saying, “Thanks for this broad sweep, taking in so much of that part of the world. I learned a lot.”
Oh, that’s very kind.
Q - [Hannah] We have another question. “How was it that Alexander the Great changed the basic culture in people of Armenia if he never invaded it?”
A - Right, yes. Well, that shows that invading doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t change culture. The footprint for the Hellenistic empire is almost exactly the same as that for the Turkish empire, say for the fact that India wasn’t part of the Turkish empire, but large parts of the Hellenistic kingdom did move as far as the Oxford River. It’s a good question. I think what it is is that it shows that if the mainstream culture, particularly the trade, politics, influence of courts, influence of government, influence of language and trade, are effective in changing the culture of a country without necessarily invading them. Very often, invasions are turning points, but it’s after the invasion that the change in culture happens. Don’t forget that Alexander completely, you know, smashed the Persian empire. He did accommodate it, in terms of his court and the ruining classes of Persia, into a strange mix of Greek and Persian, but the Hellenization of the Middle East under Alexander is a big story.
Q - [Hannah] I think you touched on this a little bit, but Joan is asking, “Do the Armenians have a lot in common with Jews apart from genocide? Name some features, please.”
A - Yup, well, yeah, I mean, I suppose the answer is a survival, long-term survival, dispersal, and prosperity. So for instance, the largest communities of Armenians are to be found in either the Republic of Armenia today, the ex-Russian Armenian provinces, or in the United States. In fact, I have dealt with people for projects. You know, a lot of the medical technology industry, there’s huge presences of experts of Armenian origin, and, apparently, the place to go to, if you want to see modern Armenian life, is to go to… Is it Glendale in California, in Hollywood? Never been there, but, yeah, I mean, you know, the existence of Armenians in America and their history and survival is very… Resonates big time, and you’ve got to ask yourself, you know, how does a group of people like the Armenians or the Jews, how do they manage to, you know, pull it off to move countries and continents and to survive massive pressures, but still are the same? I suspect that if you are someone from the Armenian plateau and the highlands, you have a pretty rough, sorry, a pretty tough identity.
Q - [Hannah] We have a question of how do the Kazars fit into this history.
A - Oh, yes, that’s a very good question. The thing is, the Kazars, I think, they are to be found at the other end of the Caucasus in Southern Russia. I mean, the Kazars are a prime example of kind of a very shifting, complicated, complex kind of group of people and an area where it seems to be changing all the time as to who they really are. I do think that the question of what I call smash and grab by nomadic peoples, how they settled down, or how they disappear is a major part of the story. It might be said that what happens in the 20th century in Turkey or in Germany is some reversion to smash and grab nomadic cultures, and they appeal in their nationalistic identities with those former boards that are travelling along the Route 69 of the steps. The only difference is that the German nationalism in the 20th century, they’re going in the wrong direction. They’re going backwards to the East. So with the Kazars, there’s a famous book by Koestler called “The Thirteenth Tribe”, which suggested that this tribe of people had decided to convert to Judaism in order to resist incursion by Christians and Muslims. Well, I suspect that that is probably very typical of the region. It might not be true as a book, but, you know, why did the Roman pagan empire suddenly convert to Christianity is a major, you know, query that I think is still not resolved? How do these changes in religion come about?
Q - [Hannah] Iana has two questions asking, “Have you yourself travelled through Cilicia, and how does the topography support the politics of that local area?”
A - Okay, yeah, well, I’m afraid to say that I haven’t been to Cilicia. I mean, it’s the turning point where, if you are in Southern Turkey and then you turn right down the end of the Mediterranean, it’s an area that, in our story, is not only a significant Cilician kingdom of Armenians, it is also an area where there are anti-Armenian demonstrations and massacres before the first World War, and it is towards Cilicia and Syria that the mountainous Armenians are pushed as part of the genocide. I can’t comment on what the local politics is of that area, but, you know, hey, could you give a lecture on it?
[Hannah] And that was our final question, just two comments saying, “Wow, very informative. I have never heard an explanation of this area of the Middle East. Thanks for a great lecture.”
Well, thank you.
[Hannah] “And fascinating presentation. Thank you,” from another attendee and that finishes up all the comments.
Well, thank you very much.
Thank you, David.
Yeah, it’s been a pleasure. See you, thank you.
Have a good night, everyone. Thank you.