Nostr notes by Vigen Avetisyan (Unofficial)

Why Baku Promotes “Western Azerbaijan”: Historical ...

2026-10-30T16:36:41Z

Why Baku Promotes “Western Azerbaijan”: Historical Propaganda, Coercion and the Risk of Escalation

By Vigen Avetisyan. Data as of October 29, 2026.
In brief. As a scholarly concept, the Azerbaijani historical narrative has failed: (read also: “Ancient Azerbaijan” and “Armenians from India”: Anatomy of a Propaganda Narrative): genetics, ancient sources, epigraphy and the documented destruction of monuments all contradict it. As a political instrument, however, it can still work, because its purpose is not to persuade historians but to build a frame for pressure: to present Armenians as a “temporary” population, Armenian heritage as “alien,” and demands on Yerevan as “restoring historical justice.” There is no evidence that a decision for a new war has been taken. But the combination of unresolved issues (Baku’s constitutional precondition, detained prisoners, an undelimited border, unimplemented court orders and high military spending) keeps the risk of escalation real. This article examines three questions: why Baku needs a scientifically weak narrative, whether it is preparing the ground for new aggression, and whether court rulings that remain on paper have any meaning. A fourth section covers the territory of Armenia that Azerbaijan is said to hold.
What has changed: the context as of October 2026
Descriptions of this conflict age quickly, so the current frame comes first.
The Washington Declaration. On August 8, 2025, Aliyev and Pashinyan signed a joint peace declaration at the White House, and the text of a peace treaty was initialed by the foreign ministers (Azatutyun, OSW).
The treaty is not signed. Baku ties its signature to a change in Armenia’s constitution, while Yerevan says it is ready to sign as soon as possible (Armenpress, October 28, 2026, Hetq). Pashinyan has suggested that signing may be possible in 2027–2028 (Armenpress).
Transit. On October 21, 2025, Aliyev announced the lifting of all restrictions on cargo transit to Armenia; Kazakh grain was the first shipment (Azatutyun, Reuters via Business Recorder).
TRIPP. The “Trump Route” of about 43 km is to run through Syunik. On October 28, 2026, Armenia’s parliament ratified the framework agreement with the United States (NT.am, Rio Times: 63 votes to 32).
Elections. In the June 7, 2026 election, Civil Contract won about 49.7% and kept a majority, but lost its two-thirds constitutional majority, so the path to a referendum remains uncertain (Azatutyun, Armenian Weekly, ConstitutionNet).
It follows that the formula “the Zangezur corridor without Armenian checkpoints” describes Baku’s position of 2021–2024, not the current document. It is more accurate to speak of a dispute over how exactly TRIPP will work and what “unimpeded connection” means (details below).
Question 1. Why does Baku spend resources on a narrative that loses to scholarship?
Because the narrative is not designed to withstand fact-checking. Its audience is the domestic population, diplomatic intermediaries, future negotiators and Armenia itself. For such an audience, repeatability and institutional backing matter more than provability.
This is an infrastructure, not a set of isolated statements. Azerbaijan has developed an official policy of the “Great Return” of Azerbaijanis to Armenia (Eurasianet). Conferences and forums operate in support of it, and state figures say that “Western Azerbaijan” is the “ancestral land” of Azerbaijanis (Azatutyun on the festival-conference in Nakhichevan). Aliyev has repeatedly called much of present-day Armenia “Western Azerbaijan” and demanded that Yerevan answer when and on what terms the “return” will happen (Azatutyun, 2025, PanArmenian). In June 2026 Baku renewed these demands (Mirror-Spectator).
The practical functions of such a narrative boil down to five.
Delegitimizing Armenian statehood. If Armenia is “not historical,” its borders and sovereignty, including control over Syunik, can be presented as subject to bargaining. Yerevan directly calls “Western Azerbaijan” an attempt to formalize territorial claims (Azatutyun, Pashinyan’s statement); Foreign Minister Mirzoyan warned as early as 2024 that this could be a prelude to a new attack (Azatutyun).
The mirror argument. Baku uses the “right of return” as a lever of reciprocity: according to Aliyev, the right of Karabakh Armenians to return should be guaranteed “mutually” together with the right of Azerbaijanis who left Armenia (OC Media). In this way the consequences of the 2023 operation are moved onto the plane of counter-demands.
Justifying the destruction of heritage. If monuments are declared “non-Armenian” in advance, their destruction or alteration can be presented as “restoring” someone else’s heritage (details: EVN Report).
Domestic mobilization. The theme of “ancestral lands” creates an emotional base for a hard-line policy. Some Azerbaijani analysts also see it as a tool for retaining the loyalty of people who came from Armenia inside Azerbaijan itself (OC Media).
A legal and political groundwork. A constantly repeated demand for “return” creates a habitual frame in which future claims look like “correcting a mistake” rather than aggression.
What Baku says. Aliyev denies that this amounts to territorial claims: in his account, return does not mean expelling Armenians, and the villages to which Azerbaijanis should return are abandoned (Eurasianet, Azatutyun). Baku insists that thousands of Azerbaijanis left Armenia under pressure in the late 1980s and that Yerevan’s position “obstructs peace.” The Armenian side in turn rejects “expulsion” in that form and calls the issue an artificial addition to the peace agenda (JAMnews). These interpretations remain disputed, and no independent international investigation of the events of 1988–1989 that would satisfy both sides has been carried out.
So the narrative has failed scientifically but works politically. Keeping the two dimensions apart is essential: falsifying history does not make it harmless.
Question 2. Is this preparing the ground for new aggression?
A correct answer has two parts: the propaganda really does serve as political cover for pressure, but the available data do not allow us to claim that a new war is inevitable.
Syunik and TRIPP: the dispute over what “connection” means
The Washington Declaration provides for “unimpeded connection” between the main part of Azerbaijan and Nakhichevan through Armenian territory, on condition that all routes remain under the sovereignty and jurisdiction of the states they pass through (Azatutyun, CivilNet). In January 2026 the agreed framework provided for a development company, 74% owned by the United States and 26% by Armenia, to build about 43 km of railway, road and utilities through Syunik (CivilNet).
The Armenian government insists that the route remains under Armenian sovereignty and that Armenian customs and border services will operate on it (CivilNet). Azerbaijani Prime Minister Ali Asadov, however, said that Armenia had accepted the demand to open a land corridor to Nakhichevan (Azatutyun). The opposition in Armenia believes that the agreement in practice meets Baku’s demand for an extraterritorial corridor and weakens sovereignty over Syunik (Azatutyun, Azatutyun on Kocharyan). Many details of the US–Armenian memoranda were not disclosed immediately (Azatutyun), and analysts stress that the question of “unimpeded access” remains politically sensitive (New Eastern Europe).
US involvement in the project gives Armenia additional protection, because any attack on Syunik would now affect American investment and Washington’s political leadership. Critics, however, point out that security guarantees are not written into the documents.
The constitutional precondition as a lever
Baku demands that the preamble of Armenia’s constitution drop its reference to the 1990 Declaration of Independence, which mentions the 1989 act of unification of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh (OSW, Azatutyun). Yerevan rejects the thesis of territorial claims, but the draft of a new constitution prepared in March 2026 provides for dropping such references (Caspian Policy Center).
The problem is that after the election the ruling party cannot take the constitutional question to a referendum on its own: two thirds of parliament are needed (ConstitutionNet). That creates a convenient asymmetry for Baku: as long as the condition is not met, the treaty remains unsigned and the pressure continues. Azerbaijani experts themselves acknowledge it is unclear whether Baku is ready to move forward without a referendum (Kiprinform/Reuters).
Military spending: an argument that must be read in full
Azerbaijan’s spending rose from about $3.8 billion in 2024 to almost $5 billion in 2025, which is 6.5% of GDP (Eurasianet). For 2026, 8.71 billion manats (about $5.1 billion) is budgeted for defense and security, 3.8% more than in 2025 (PanArmenian, OC Media). According to SIPRI data for 2025, Azerbaijan ranks sixth in the world by military burden on the economy, and Armenia seventh with 6.1% of GDP (PanArmenian).
Two clarifications matter for an honest assessment. First, Armenia has also increased spending (about $1.7 billion in 2025), although in 2026 it cut it to roughly $1.47 billion (Eurasianet, Caspian Post). Second, Azerbaijan’s medium-term budget provides for a gradual decline in defense spending by 2029–2030 (PanArmenian). The figures alone do not prove preparation for an offensive: they show that Baku retains a substantial military advantage while maintaining negotiating pressure.
What restrains escalation
Several factors work against a scenario of rapid war.
The American stake. TRIPP ties Washington to the security of Syunik: an attack on the route would hit a project the United States regards as its own achievement (NT.am).
Baku’s own interest. The route spares Azerbaijan from shipping fuel to Nakhichevan through Iran and offers new sources of income at a time of declining oil output (OSW, Caucasian Knot).
Practical rapprochement. The transit ban has been lifted; in January 2026 Azerbaijan released four Armenian prisoners (Reuters via The Star); and on June 14, 2026 Aliyev’s aide Hikmet Hajiyev traveled to Dilijan for talks with the secretary of Armenia’s Security Council (Azatutyun). Mirzoyan says that de facto peace already exists and shows in cross-border trade and transport (Hetq).
What is alarming
None of the causes of the conflict has been closed legally: the treaty is unsigned, the border is undelimited, and prisoners are still held.
The 2023 precedent showed that Baku is able to settle an issue by force after prolonged pressure, and that international reactions were limited.
Baku still insists on the theme of “return” and on changing the constitution, that is, it keeps two levers open at once.
Access for independent observers has shrunk: the International Committee of the Red Cross office in Baku has been closed since September 2025, and since then no international organization has visited the Armenian prisoners (Caucasian Knot).
Conclusion on the second question
On the basis of open data, it can be argued that Baku’s historical propaganda serves as political and informational cover for pressure on Armenia. It cannot be argued that a decision on a new full-scale aggression has been taken: over the past year Baku has also taken concrete steps toward Armenia. The most accurate description is a strategy of coercion with a persisting risk of escalation. Indicators worth watching:
Whether new state institutions and budget programs for “Western Azerbaijan” appear, and whether the theme of “return” turns into concrete demands on the border.
How construction of TRIPP proceeds and whether Armenian customs and border services remain on the route.
Whether a path to changing the constitution is found now that the ruling party has lost two thirds of the seats.
Whether there are incidents on undelimited sections of the border and reports of new positions.
Whether the remaining prisoners are released and access for international organizations is restored.
Question 3. Do the court rulings on the Lachin Corridor mean anything if no Armenians remain in Artsakh?
They do, but not what they meant when they were issued. Courts record violations and create a legal basis for future claims, but they do not replace a mechanism of enforcement. It is important to distinguish what was actually decided.
The Lachin Corridor. On February 22, 2023, the International Court of Justice ordered Azerbaijan to take all measures to ensure unimpeded movement of people, vehicles and cargo along the corridor in both directions; the vote was 13 to 2 (ICJ press release). The blockade continued, and on April 23, 2023 Azerbaijan set up a checkpoint on the corridor, saying this was how it was complying with the court’s order (Mirzoyan’s OSCE speech).
The July 6, 2023 order. An inaccuracy is often repeated here. The Court unanimously found that the circumstances did not require modifying the February measure (Armenia had asked it to require withdrawal of personnel from the corridor), and unanimously reaffirmed the February measure (text of the order, press release). The operative part contains no finding that the checkpoint “plausibly” constitutes racial discrimination. Armenia reads the order as confirming that the measure is binding; Azerbaijan reads it as recognition that the checkpoint is legitimate (Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry); the merits have not yet been decided (ASIL).
After September 2023. After the Azerbaijani operation of September 19–20, 2023, more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians left Nagorno-Karabakh (AP, Al Jazeera). On November 17, 2023, the Court ordered Azerbaijan to ensure the safe, unimpeded and swift return of those who wish to return (EVN Report). These measures have not been implemented: there is no mass return. The Armenian side and a number of researchers describe what happened as ethnic cleansing (Just Security, testimony of Luis Moreno Ocampo). Baku denies coercion and says people left voluntarily; the term “ethnic cleansing” has no separate definition in international law (Völkerrechtsblog). It is therefore legally correct to write about a mass exodus that the Court treated as a humanitarian crisis, and to document the circumstances without substituting a legal qualification.
The fate of the cases. The initialed treaty obliges the parties, within one month of its entry into force, to “withdraw, close or otherwise settle” all interstate claims (Article 15) (Armenpress). Armenia’s representative says that no decision on withdrawal has been made (OC Media). Supporters of the approach say that peace is impossible without mutual closing of claims (Baku also has cases against Armenia) (Strasbourg Observers). Critics believe that dropping the cases would entrench impunity and deprive Armenia of leverage on the prisoners and on return (Armenian Weekly, E-IR).
The prisoners
After four people were released on January 14, 2026, 19 Armenian prisoners remain in Azerbaijan (Armenpress). On February 17, 2026, a military court in Baku sentenced Ruben Vardanyan to 20 years, and former Karabakh leaders received sentences ranging from 15 years to life; the defense and Amnesty International say the trials fell short of fair-trial standards (PanArmenian, News.am). In April 2026 the prisoners were moved to the Umbaki prison (Mirror-Spectator). Baku treats them as defendants accused of war crimes and terrorism. The European Court of Human Rights required reports on their detention and health, and relatives reported inadequate medical care (Caucasian Knot). On October 28, 2026, Mirzoyan said that the path on this issue runs through dialogue with Baku (NT.am).
Question 4. Is Azerbaijan holding territory of Armenia?
Armenian officials and independent researchers say that Azerbaijani forces are on territory of Armenia recognized under Soviet-era borders. Estimates of the area diverge widely: from 50 to 215 square kilometers in early estimates (Wikipedia, overview of estimates), about 240 in Armenian government statements (Azatutyun), and at least 241.4 by the count of journalist Hayk Hovhannisyan (CivilNet, CivilNet, sections by district). In Tavush, these include areas near the villages of Berdavan, Voskepar and Kirants (EVN Report).
B

https://allinnet.info/news/why-baku-promotes-western-azerbaijan-historical-propaganda-coercion-and-the-risk-of-escalation/

#baku #azerbaijan #propaganda #risk #escalation #ancientazerbaijan #october #armenia #narrative #azatutyun

#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

“Ancient Azerbaijan” and “Armenians from India”: Anatomy ...

2026-10-30T00:44:22Z

“Ancient Azerbaijan” and “Armenians from India”: Anatomy of a Propaganda Narrative

By Vigen Avetisyan
In brief. The claim that present-day Armenia is “historical Azerbaijan” and that Armenians are late settlers from India contradicts independent evidence from genetics, linguistics, epigraphy, archaeology and the written record. So does the claim that Armenian church inscriptions were made in the late medieval or Soviet period: Armenian epigraphy was documented long before the USSR, and early dates are backed by palaeography, building technique, stratigraphy and outside historical sources.
The claims and the evidence at a glance
Propaganda claimWhat independent checks show“Armenians came from India or are Roma”Armenian is a separate branch of the Indo-European family, and genetic data show local continuity, not late migration from South Asia. See Eight Millennia of Matrilineal Genetic Continuity in the South Caucasus.“Armenia is ancient Azerbaijan”The historical name “Azerbaijan” belongs to Atropatene in Iran; today’s Azerbaijani identity took shape much later. See Appropriation of Armenian Cultural Heritage of Artsakh.“Armenian churches are Caucasian Albanian or ancient Turkic”Inscriptions, khachkars, architecture and church tradition are identified through epigraphy and art history. See Armenian Palaeography: Dating the Major Scripts.“The inscriptions were made in the USSR”Armenian epigraphy was documented long before the USSR; dating rests on palaeography, language, carving technique and architectural context. See the same palaeography study above.“There was no Armenian heritage”Armenian monuments were destroyed on a mass scale: 108 of 110 sites in Nakhichevan. See Religious Freedom Conditions in Azerbaijan.
Part 1. “Armenia” in the earliest written sources
The Behistun inscription (c. 520 BC)
The Behistun inscription was carved on the orders of Darius I, who reigned from 522 to 486 BC. It is written in three languages: Old Persian, Elamite and Akkadian (Babylonian). Each version names the same country differently:
VersionName of the countryAkkadian / BabylonianUrashtu, a form of UrartuOld PersianArmina, i.e. ArmeniaElamiteHarminuia, i.e. Armenia
In other words, the land the Assyrians called Urartu was already officially called Armenia in Persian administrative usage. Urartu was a multi-ethnic state, that Armenian political and cultural tradition later developed in. Behistun is the earliest undisputed written mention of the name Armenia, which makes the idea that the name was invented in the late Middle Ages, the Russian Empire or the USSR untenable: the name is documented some 2,500 years before those claims appeared.
The text and its context can be checked at Livius.org, in the Wikipedia article, and in the trilingual text edition from Göttingen (PDF).
Herodotus: Armenians in the army of Xerxes (5th century BC)
In Histories 7.73 Herodotus lists the Armenians among the peoples in Xerxes’ army as a distinct nation, armed like the Phrygians. He calls them Phrygian colonists. That Phrygian origin is a Greek tradition that modern scholarship treats as unproven, so it should not be presented as established fact. What matters here is that Herodotus records the Armenians as a separate people already part of the Achaemenid military and political system, which is incompatible with any story of arrival from India.
Xenophon: a real country with villages and tribute (4th century BC)
In Book 4 of the Anabasis (text; see also the Encyclopaedia Iranica entry on Armenia), Xenophon follows Greek mercenaries across Armenia. A local tells them that the land is Armenia, and Xenophon describes villages, local governors, horse breeding, everyday life and tribute paid to the Persian king. This is independent Greek testimony for Armenia and its population centuries before the Middle Ages, the Russian Empire or the USSR.
Strabo: borders and resources (early 1st century AD)
Strabo’s Geography (Book 11, chapter 14: 11.14.1–4, 11.14.5–9 and 11.14.10–14) describes Armenia in detail: its borders, the Euphrates and Araxes rivers, mountains, climate, cities, horse breeding, gold mines and heavy cavalry. He presents a large, durable country with its own political geography, which is hard to square with the idea of a late, artificial creation. He wrote almost two thousand years before today’s Azerbaijani territorial claims.
Pliny the Elder: Greater Armenia (1st century AD)
In his Natural History (Book VI), Pliny describes Greater Armenia: the Euphrates separates it from Cappadocia, the Tigris from Mesopotamia, and he mentions Artaxata on the plain by the Araxes. For Rome, Armenia was a concrete country that could be placed on a map.
Tacitus and Plutarch: Armenian statehood
Tacitus, in the Annals, Book XV (also available in a mirror edition), repeatedly shows Armenia as a stake in Roman–Parthian politics, including a Tigranes installed by Rome as king. Plutarch, in the Life of Lucullus (Tigranes the Great: sources), portrays Tigranes II as a “king of kings” whose power could cut the Parthians off from Asia, move Greek cities into Media and dominate Syria and Palestine. These sources present Armenia as a sovereign state with kings, an army, diplomacy and international weight.
Summary of the written evidence
SourceDateWhat it recordsBehistun inscription of Darius Ic. 520 BCArmina / Armenia; in the Babylonian version, Urashtu / UrartuHerodotus5th c. BCArmenians as a distinct people in Xerxes’ armyXenophon4th c. BCArmenia as a country with villages, population, horses and tributeStraboearly 1st c. ADBorders, cities, resources and political weight of ArmeniaPliny the Elder1st c. ADGreater Armenia, its rivers, borders and citiesTacitus and Plutarch1st–2nd c. ADArmenian kings, dynastic politics and statehoodTekor inscriptions480s ADArmenian church inscriptions long before the USSR
These sources are independent of one another, and they point the same way.
Part 2. Armenians did not come from India
The claim that Armenians (“Hay”) originate in India, or are “Gypsies”, has no support in academic linguistics, genetics or history. Armenian is a separate branch of the Indo-European family. Romani belongs to the Indo-Aryan group, and confusing two such different branches is an elementary scientific error.
Genetics: 7,800 years of maternal continuity
The key study is Ashot Margaryan and colleagues’ Eight Millennia of Matrilineal Genetic Continuity in the South Caucasus, published in Current Biology in 2017. The authors sequenced complete mitochondrial genomes of 52 ancient individuals from the territory of present-day Armenia and Artsakh, covering 7,800 years, and compared them with 206 mitochondrial genomes of modern Armenians.
Their finding is that maternal lineages in the South Caucasus show continuity over roughly eight millennia: cultural change and migration waves did not replace the local population wholesale. This undermines the propaganda thesis directly. If Armenians had arrived in the region only in the Middle Ages or shortly before, their maternal lineages could not connect continuously with Bronze Age and earlier populations of the same territory. Nor does the study support any scenario of late mass migration from South Asia; it instead links the modern Armenian population with the ancient population of the Armenian Highland. (It is a study of maternal lineages, so it speaks to population continuity rather than settling every question about the origin of the Armenian language or ethnos.)
Part 3. Armenian inscriptions are far older than the USSR
The key caveat
The assertion that “Armenian inscriptions appeared in the late medieval or Soviet period” is a propaganda device, not a historical fact. Armenian stone inscriptions are studied as a discipline of their own, Armenian epigraphy, and they are dated by letter forms, orthography, language, iconography, carving technique, the context of the building and comparison with precisely dated manuscripts (see Armenian Palaeography: Dating the Major Scripts and the overview of Armenian Epigraphy and Paleography).
The accurate statement is this: Armenian inscriptions on churches, khachkars and cemeteries existed in the Middle Ages and earlier, and the Soviet period cannot have been the time of their mass “creation”. In Soviet times many religious monuments were closed, demolished, handed over for economic use or changed function (see Cultural Genocide).
If the inscriptions had really been made in the late medieval period or the USSR, that would not explain their presence on buildings recorded by travellers, church documents, maps, archives and scholarly publications long before the 20th century. Palaeographic research dates some Armenian inscriptions as early as the late 5th century.
The earliest evidence
The alphabet. Mesrop Mashtots created the Armenian alphabet in the early 5th century. Dated and datable stone inscriptions appear soon afterwards.
Tekor Basilica. One of the important early examples. The inscription at the west entrance calls the building a “martyrion of St Sargis” and links it with Prince Sahak Kamsarakan and Patriarch Yovhan Mandakuni, which places the monument in the 480s. See Tracing the oldest Armenian script and Oldest Armenian inscriptions: Tekor Basilica. In short, Armenian inscriptions on church buildings existed in the 5th century, roughly 1,450 years before the USSR was founded.
Greco-Armenian papyrus. A papyrus found in Egypt, dated no later than 640, contains Greek text written in Armenian letters. It is independent evidence that Armenian writing existed and circulated outside Armenia itself.
Manuscripts. The earliest clearly dated surviving Armenian manuscript is Queen Mlke’s Gospel, made in 862.
Khachkars. These carved cross-stones are a distinct, instantly recognisable tradition of Armenian memorial art. Their form, carving and epigraphy cannot plausibly be explained as “Soviet forgery”.
The chain of evidence is unbroken: the 5th-century alphabet, stone inscriptions of the 5th–6th centuries, early manuscripts and a book tradition spanning many centuries.
Why the “Soviet inscriptions” thesis fails
It would require forging not only thousands of inscriptions but also architecture, building plans, cemeteries, archives, maps, photographs, 19th-century publications and the accounts of foreign travellers. And the Soviet authorities often closed and destroyed religious sites rather than building them.
Part 4. “Armenia is ancient Azerbaijan”: the problem of anachronism
The historical place-name “Azerbaijan” is tied above all to north-western Iran, the region of Atropatene / Adurbadagan. The present-day Republic of Azerbaijan received that name only in the 20th century. Projecting the modern ethno-political label “Azerbaijanis” onto the ancient states and peoples of the Caucasus is retrospective reconstruction, not historical method.
Caucasian Albania was likewise not an “Azerbaijani state” in the modern sense. The Turkic Oghuz tribes who played a central role in forming today’s Azerbaijani population moved into Transcaucasia in large numbers much later, in the Middle Ages. Calling Armenian churches, khachkars and inscriptions “ancient Azerbaijani” is therefore an anachronism.
Researchers describe Azerbaijan’s current policy toward the Armenian heritage of Nagorno-Karabakh as reclassifying Armenian monuments as “non-Armenian”, cutting their link to Armenian identity and constructing a narrative of a long-standing Azerbaijani presence. See Appropriation of Armenian Cultural Heritage of Artsakh.
How to tell that a church is Armenian
Armenian identity of temples, monasteries, cemeteries and khachkars is established by a set of independent features, not by political statements:
Armenian-language building and memorial inscriptions
Palaeography and orthography of Armenian script
Architectural types characteristic of the Armenian church tradition
Khachkars, a specific form of Armenian memorial art
Mentions of the monuments in medieval and early modern sources
Dating of materials, building layers and rebuilding phases
Part 5. The destruction of Armenian heritage
Nakhichevan
The best-documented case is the Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic. Cornell University’s Caucasus Heritage Watch carried out a multi-year investigation using high-resolution satellite imagery and archival data (see Report shows near-total erasure of Armenian heritage sites).
Of 110 identified medieval and early modern Armenian monasteries, churches and cemeteries, 108 were completely destroyed between 1997 and 2011. Researchers describe this as a systematic, state-backed programme of cultural erasure (Religious Freedom Conditions in Azerbaijan). By CHW’s estimate, 98% of the Armenian cultural sites in Nakhichevan that could be located and verified were wiped out (US Researchers Confirm 98% of Cultural Armenian Heritage Sites in Nakhichevan Destroyed by Azerbaijan).
This bears directly on the dispute over authenticity: it was precisely Armenian churches, monasteries, cemeteries and khachkars that were targeted. If these objects were not Armenian, their deliberate disappearance would make no sense.
Image: khachkars from the Armenian cemetery in Julfa, Nakhichevan. It held the largest surviving collection of khachkars, most dating to the 15th and 16th centuries, and was destroyed in 2005, according to the caption of the source image.
Khachkars(decorated cross-stones typical of medieval Christian Armenian art)from the Armenian cemetery in Julfa, Nakhijevan, Azerbaijan. This cemetery contained the largest surviving collection of Armenian khachkar, most dating to the 15th and 16th centuries. Destroyed by Azerbaijan in 2005
Karabakh after 2020
Since the 2020 war there have been reports of crosses being removed, khachkars damaged and Armenian churches altered in Karabakh. The UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights received reports of such acts, including an incident in Hadrut in January 2022 (Appropriation of Armenian Cultural Heritage of Artsakh).
The destruction of the Church of St Sargis in Mokhrenes in 2022 was regarded as the first major violation of the December 2021 order of the International Court of Justice, which required Azerbaijan to prevent vandalism of Armenian cultural heritage (Cornell report).
Physical destruction goes hand in hand with symbolic appropriation: Armenian monuments are renamed, stripped of crosses and Armenian inscriptions, and then presented as “Caucasian Albanian” or “ancient Turkic”.
Turkey
The scale of Armenian heritage losses in Turkey is documented too. According to figures cited from a 1974 UNESCO report, of 913 Armenian historical monuments in eastern Turkey after 1923:
464 disappeared entirely
252 lay in ruins
197 needed urgent restoration
Armenian churches and monasteries in Turkey were often wrecked, used as warehouses, stables or clubs, used for target practice, or converted into mosques (see Cultural Genocide). Even surviving monuments are often stripped of their Armenian identification, which closes a propaganda loop: first an Armenian monument is destroyed or depersonalised, then its absence or “non-Armenian” status is cited as “proof” that there was never an Armenian presence (Appropriation of Armenian Cultural Heritage of Artsakh).
Part 6. Maps
Three maps help to visualise the geography:
A historical map of Urartu shows the state on the Armenian Highland and its neighbours: Media, Assyria and the area of the Behistun inscription. It is a visual aid for the geographic continuity between Urartu and the later Armenia.
A second map shows Urartu on the Armenian Highland, which in the Achaemenid period was designated in Persian administration as Armina / Armenia.
A map of Armenia under Tigranes the Great shows the scale of Armenian statehood in antiquity, long before the toponym “Azerbaijan” appeared and before today’s Azerbaijani identity formed.
Conclusion
The scientifically and documentarily supported picture is the opposite of the propaganda. Armenians are an indigenous people of the Armenian Highland, with maternal genetic continuity demonstrated over at least 7,800 years (study). The name “Armenia” is recorded in the Behistun inscription around 520 BC. The Armenian language, script, church and architecture each have their own centuries-long history.
The claim th

https://allinnet.info/news/ancient-azerbaijan-and-armenians-from-india-anatomy-of-a-propaganda-narrative/

#propagandanarrative #ancientazerbaijan #armenian #india #anatomy #ussr #armenianpalaeography #see #behistun #inscriptions

#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Shenatagh: Iron Age Tombs Beneath a Syunik Courtyard — and a ...

2026-10-28T17:15:36Z

Shenatagh: Iron Age Tombs Beneath a Syunik Courtyard — and a Heritage Route from Sisian to Tatev

Archaeology · Travel · Syunik, Armenia — October 28, 2026
A routine groundwork job in the southern Armenian village of Shenatagh has turned into one of the more intriguing archaeological stories of the season. While local residents were clearing land beside their house, they broke into an ancient stone burial chamber. Specialists now report at least three large tomb chambers dating, in their field assessment, to the 7th–6th centuries BC, with hundreds of finds already in the laboratory. This article does two things: it sets out what has actually been reported and what it may mean in the context of Syunik’s Iron Age, and it places Shenatagh on a practical heritage route — from Sisian’s Zorats Karer and Shaki Waterfall to the medieval monastery of Tatev — with places to eat and sleep along the way.
A note on sourcing. The facts of the discovery below come from a single broadcast report by the Russian-language channel MIR 24 (correspondent Lilit Madunts), the text of which was supplied for this article; the direct URL of the report was not included, and I could not locate an independent second report or any formal publication from the excavators. Everything about the find itself should therefore be read as a preliminary, field-stage account. Background and travel information is drawn from the linked sources throughout and collected at the end.
1. What was found
According to the MIR 24 report, the discovery took place in Syunik Province during earthworks in the yard of a residential house in Shenatagh. The residents were enlarging their plot to make room for an apiary and had no idea that an ancient cemetery lay under the soil. One villager, Hayk Harutyunyan, told the reporter that the digging exposed a pit containing clay vessels and other objects, and that the family notified specialists straight away; he described the moment as a shock, since nobody had imagined such a monument could lie beneath a home.
Archaeologists then documented three large burial chambers. The structures are rectangular, built of stone and roofed with massive slabs. Inside, the team recorded a rich assemblage: ceramics, bronze and iron objects, including fragments of weapons and items of personal adornment.
Two specialists from the state Service for the Protection of the Historic Environment and Historical-Cultural Museum-Reserves gave details:
Asmik Simonyan, anthropologist, said that the team was working at the entrance (dromos) end of one tomb, and that the burial chamber behind it is about eight metres long. It contained more than 100 vessels and human remains that were not lying in anatomical order. In her reading, this points to a collective burial that was probably used repeatedly, with new interments added over time.
Anna Baghdasaryan, conservator, reported that the laboratory already holds over 200 objects — pottery, arrowheads, knives, bronze bracelets and belt elements — many of them almost fully preserved. She added that, in her estimation, this is perhaps only about one percent of what may still be hidden underground.
All finds have been transferred to the laboratory, where cleaning, classification and detailed study are beginning. Full-scale fieldwork on site is waiting for dry weather.
2. How to read the find
A family or community vault, not a single grave. Disarticulated human remains in a long stone chamber are a classic sign of a tomb that stayed open or was reopened across generations. When a new burial was added, earlier bones were commonly pushed aside or gathered together. That is consistent with Simonyan’s remark about repeated use, and it suggests a community that kept a long relationship with one burial place rather than a short-lived necropolis.
The grave goods. Arrowheads, knives, bronze bracelets and belt parts are the kind of items that fill Iron Age burials across the Armenian Highland, and the presence of both bronze and iron is itself a useful marker of the period. Precise typological parallels will only be possible once the objects are drawn, catalogued and published, so the 7th–6th-century BC date should be treated as an initial field dating that radiocarbon and typology may refine.
An unusually pottery-rich context. In the 2015 southern Syunik survey run by the Armenian Academy of Sciences and NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, Dan Potts noted that walls and tombs across the region tended to come with relatively little pottery, which makes dating difficult (ISAW report). A single chamber with more than a hundred vessels, if it holds up under study, could therefore become a valuable reference sequence for the region. That is my inference rather than a claim made by the excavators.
What cannot yet be said. The report does not identify the people buried, their social status, or the settlement they belonged to. No inscriptions, seals or imported luxury items are mentioned. Any ethnic or political attribution would be premature.
3. Syunik in the Iron Age: why this matters
Syunik has long been called under-studied. Onnik Khnkikyan’s monograph on the Bronze and Iron Ages of the province opens by describing the region as a “white spot” on the archaeological map (Khnkikyan, Syunik’ during the Bronze and Iron Ages, 2002), and a recent review of the volume Sacred Landscapes of Syunik during the Bronze and Iron Ages stresses both the exceptional density of sites and the fact that systematic research in the province has only intensified since 2013 (review in Armenian Journal of Near Eastern Studies-type proceedings, arar.sci.am).
The 2015 ISAW–Institute of Archaeology survey, based at Sisian, gives a sense of the landscape in which Shenatagh sits (ISAW):
Iron Age sites with monumental walls of unworked stone, often perched on the edges of steep ravines, are a feature of the region; one was located on a forested mountainside near Halidzor, on the road south toward Tatev — not far from Shenatagh.
At Ashotavan the team found a settlement and tombs of the early to mid-1st millennium BC with diagnostic Achaemenid pottery and a Scythian-style bronze arrowhead.
At Tanahat, an important Urartian inscription was found in 1975 carved on a reused medieval khachkar.
Against that backdrop, Shenatagh adds something the survey could rarely document: a large, richly furnished, multi-use burial structure from the period when the Van Kingdom (Urartu) was in its final phase and the Highland was entering the Achaemenid era.
Interpretive note: how this period is framed
The 7th–6th centuries BC sit across a historiographical fault line. The mainstream academic framework treats this as the late Urartian period, followed by the collapse of the Van Kingdom and the Median–Achaemenid transition, with the Orontid (Yervanduni) satrapy emerging in the Achaemenid period. The line taken on this site — a continuous Armenian Highland civilisation from the Van Kingdom through the Achaemenid-era satrapy to Hellenistic Armenia — would read a burial tradition like Shenatagh’s as local continuity within that sequence. The Shenatagh material cannot by itself settle that debate: it is a burial assemblage whose cultural attribution depends on future comparison with other Syunik, Lake Sevan and Ararat-plain cemeteries. Readers should treat this paragraph as a framing of the question, not as a result of the excavation.
4. Visiting: the Shenatagh–Sisian–Tatev heritage route
First, an important caveat
The tombs are on private residential land, are under active archaeological work, and are not an organised visitor site. Please do not go looking for the courtyard, and do not collect anything from the surrounding fields. The best way to “see” the discovery is the route below — the village itself, the Iron Age and medieval landscape around it, and the museum and monument collections of Sisian. The report does not say where the finds will ultimately be displayed.
Where Shenatagh is
Shenatagh (Շենաթաղ; earlier Shinagat and Lernashen) is a village in the Sisian Municipality of Syunik, at about 39°22′48″ N, 46°07′56″ E, with a recorded population of 422 in 2010. Trail descriptions place it roughly 25 km south of Sisian (Wikiloc, AllTrails), and the same trails connect it on foot to Tatev. It makes sense to treat Shenatagh as the quiet, archaeologically interesting middle stop between the town of Sisian and the monastery of Tatev.
Getting there and road conditions
From Yerevan: Sisian lies about 220 km south of the capital (Bumpylands) on the north–south M2 highway to Goris, Kapan and Meghri. Public transport: buses run from Yerevan’s Kilikia station to Sisian, and from there onward to Shenatagh by taxi or local transport (Hiking Project).
Main road: The M2 is a major state highway and is generally passable, but mountain sections around Sisian and Goris are prone to black ice and closures in winter (Armenpress, Armenpress, Sisian–Goris closure). We are now at the end of October, so check the Ministry of Interior Rescue Service road bulletins before leaving, and carry winter tyres from late autumn on.
Local roads: I could not find a published survey of the surface of the access road to Shenatagh. Treat it as a rural mountain road: drive slowly, expect patches of damaged asphalt or gravel, and ask locally in Sisian before setting out after rain or snow. The Tatev–Ltsen link, built to shorten the Tatev–Sisian journey, is part of a wider road-upgrade programme in the province (ARKA, Armenpress).
Border region: Syunik borders Azerbaijan and Iran, and some guides advise checking locally before visiting sites close to the frontier (Wikivoyage, Sisian). I have not verified current official travel advisories, so check your government’s guidance and the latest local news before travelling.
Suggested itinerary (2–3 days)
Day 1 — Yerevan to Sisian: the megalithic and natural highlights
Optional en route: Noravank near Yeghegnadzor, one of the key stops on the way south.
Shaki Waterfall — a few kilometres north-west of Sisian, just before the town. Guides give its height as around 18 m, though some sources quote higher figures (Bumpylands, Advantour). The local legend tells of a girl named Shaki who leapt from the cliff to escape conquerors, her dress turning into the falls (Absolute Armenia). Wear sturdy shoes; the rocks near the base can be slippery (Unusual Nomad).
Zorats Karer / Karahunj — the prehistoric stone-circle site on a plateau at about 1,770 m on the left bank of the Dar River, a few kilometres north of Sisian and a short walk from the highway. Over 200 basalt stones, some taller than three metres, stand in circles and lines (Unusual Nomad). It is popularly called the “Armenian Stonehenge”; the astronomical-observatory interpretation is widely repeated but remains debated among specialists. Late afternoon light is best.
Sisian town — the Sisavan church (St. Gregory / St. Hovhannes, 7th century) and the town museums; the regional history museum displays Bronze Age pottery and finds from Karahunj (Rediscovering Armenia guidebook). This is the best place to see what Syunik’s prehistoric burials look like in a museum case before visiting Shenatagh.
Overnight in Sisian.
Day 2 — Sisian to Shenatagh to Tatev
Shenatagh village — see the village centre and its St. Martiros church (preserved since 1704); the surrounding hills hold khachkars, a chapel, the medieval ruins of Tsoraberd and the remains of Fort Tatan and Fort Sagu (trail notes, Wikiloc mirror). Treat the village as a living community and the excavation as off-limits.
Either drive on to Tatev, or hike. The classic hike runs from a monument at the edge of Shenatagh up toward Mount Aramazd, past an abandoned settlement to Svarants (with its 18th-century St. Hazaraprkich church) and down to Tatev: roughly 18 km (11 miles), rated hard, about 6.5–7 hours, climbing to around 2,500 m (AllTrails, Hiking Project). Do it only in stable weather, with a map and a local contact.
Tatev Monastery (founded in the 9th century on a cliff edge, per AllTrails), the Wings of Tatev aerial tramway and Devil’s Bridge (Hiking Project).
Overnight in Tatev.
Day 3 (optional) — Vorotan Valley and the highlands
Vorotnavank — the monastic complex whose St. Karapet church dates to 1006 and preserves a 14th-century wall painting.
Tanahat — the monastic ruins where the Urartian inscription was found in 1975 (ISAW).
Aghitu — a memorial from the 6th–7th century and a nearby Paleolithic cave; also Angeghakot’s rock-cut St. Vardan church (Armenian Weekly).
Ughtasar petroglyphs — thousands of rock carvings high above Sisian, about 20 km from town (Advantour), reachable only by off-road vehicle, and realistically a summer excursion; hire a local driver.
Getatagh’s St. Astvatsatsin church (1702), also in the Sisian municipality.
Where to eat
Place data below comes from Google Maps; hours and menus change, so confirm before you go.
Sisian
Van Tavern — 1 Israelyan St; simple local restaurant with outdoor seating and homemade dumplings; open daily.
Vega Cafe — 32 Sisakan St; modern café for coffee, desserts and lighter meals.
Basen Restaurant — 2 Ara Manukyan St; grill-focused menu, attached to the Basen hotel; Armeniapedia has long listed it as a cosy local choice (Armeniapedia).
Dproci Xachmeruk — 14 Tumanyan St; garden gazebos, khachapuri and barbecue; open late.
Manveli Mot – Eco Food — in Shaki village near the waterfall; a family garden restaurant where the host cooks from what is fresh that day. Ring ahead on +374 93 770040.
Tatev
Tatev Authentic Food — family restaurant serving local dishes such as harissa; open daily.
Most Tatev guesthouses below serve dinner and breakfast on request.
Where to stay
Sisian
Lalaner Hotel — 29 Sisakan St; central, breakfast included; older rooms, a basic option.
Dina Hotel — 35 Sisakan St; budget hotel with a small garden.
Flamenco Hotel — 1 Vorotan St.
Azoyan Holiday Resort — on the Shaki road, a family-run guesthouse near the waterfall; convenient for the Day 1 stops.
Tatev area
Old Tatev Guesthouse — family-run, garden with mountain views, home-cooked breakfast.
Saro B&B — about ten minutes’ walk from the monastery; the family also runs a restaurant.
Tatev Guest House — a quiet village house with a back garden.
Harsnadzor Resort — cabin-style resort with strong views, but guest reviews on service and room quality are mixed, so read recent reviews first.
Shenatagh itself has no listed hotels or restaurants that I could verify, so plan your meals and beds in Sisian or Tatev.
Practical tips
Season: Sisian is high and cold; winters are long, summers pleasantly cool (Armeniapedia). From November, expect ice and possible closures on mountain roads and avoid Ughtasar.
Cash and fuel: carry cash for village guesthouses and fill up in Sisian, Goris or Yeghegnadzor.
Guides: a local guide adds a great deal at Zorats Karer, where the on-site interpretation is thin (Wikivoyage, Sisian).
Etiquette: do not touch or remove material from archaeological sites, even apparently abandoned ones. Chance discoveries should be reported to the heritage service, exactly as the Shenatagh family did.
5. What to watch next
Three things will determine how important Shenatagh turns out to be: the laboratory results (typology, absolute dating and anthropological study of the collective burials); whether the remaining chambers are excavated and published in full once the weather allows; and whether the site is protected and presented — through a museum display in Sisian or on site — rather than being absorbed back into a backyard. The fact that a family reported the find rather than hiding it is a quiet success for heritage protection in the province.
Sources and further reading
MIR 24 report on the Shenatagh tombs (Lilit Madunts), via mir24.tv — text supplied; direct article link not available.
Shenatagh — Wikipedia; Shenatagh — Wikidata
Dan Potts, Archaeological Investigations in Southern Armenia, ISAW/NYU, 2015
O. Khnkikyan, Syunik’ during the Bronze and Iron Ages, Mayreni Publishing, 2002
Review of Sacred Landscapes of Syunik during the Bronze and Iron Ages
Gayane Barseghyan, Fleeting glimpses into Syunik’s villages, The Armenian Weekly, 2024 (partly paywalled)
Trail guides: AllTrails, Hiking Project, Wikiloc
Sisian travel:

https://allinnet.info/archeology/shenatagh-iron-age-tombs-beneath-a-syunik-courtyard-and-a-heritage-route-from-sisian-to-tatev/

#syunikcourtyard #heritageroute #ironage #agetombs #shenatagh #tatev #sisian #syunikprovince #shakiwaterfall #zoratskarer

#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

The History of Armenian Coinage and Money: From Ancient Times to ...

2026-10-25T18:47:17Z

The History of Armenian Coinage and Money: From Ancient Times to the Dram

From weighed silver and Achaemenid-era imports to the kings of Sophene, the coins of Tigranes the Great, the Cilician tram and the modern dram — a source-backed overview of roughly 2,500 years of monetary history on the Armenian Highland.
Key points
The oldest coin finds on Armenian soil are imports of the 5th century BC, found at Erebuni and elsewhere; the Highland’s first locally struck royal coinage appears in the 3rd century BC in the kingdom of Sophene.
The silver drachm (Armenian dram) of the Attic standard became the backbone of the monetary system from the late 4th century BC, and its name survives in the national currency today.
Under Tigranes II the Great (c. 95–56 BC) Armenian silver tetradrachms, struck at Artaxata, Tigranocerta and Syrian mints, became an imperial coinage.
For long stretches of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, Armenia was supplied mostly by foreign coins — Roman, Sasanian, Byzantine, Arab, Georgian, Mongol — while native issues were rare and politically significant.
The Cilician kingdom (1198/99–1375) produced the most famous medieval Armenian coins, the silver tram, which the modern dram explicitly echoes.
The modern dram was introduced on 22 November 1993.
1. Before coins: weighed silver and exchange
Coinage was invented in the 7th century BC in the Aegean–Anatolian world, but the idea of money is much older. Across the ancient Near East, silver functioned as a standard of value, a means of payment and a store of wealth from the mid-3rd millennium BC onward — not as stamped coins, but as rings, bars, ingots and cut fragments weighed out at each transaction (see L. Peyronel, “Ancient Near Eastern Economics: The Silver Question”, and the survey “Money and Exchange Mechanisms in the Near East”). A University of Haifa study of hoards from the Levant likewise argues that weight-based silver currency was operating there centuries before the first coins (report).
The Armenian Highland — with its rich metal resources, its Urartian palace economy and its position between Mesopotamia, Anatolia and the Caucasus — belonged to this same world. Direct, quantified evidence for how Urartian and early Armenian households paid for things is thin, and this article does not claim more than the general Near Eastern pattern allows: before coins, value was measured in weighed metal, grain, livestock and goods. Even in the 5th–4th centuries BC, the standard numismatic survey by Khachatur Mousheghian (revised by Aram Manasaryan) notes that barter was still more typical than coin use in Armenia (ANRO, “The History of Armenian Numismatics”).
2. The first coins on the Highland (5th–4th centuries BC)
The earliest numismatic finds in Armenia date to the 5th century BC. According to Mousheghian and Manasaryan, they include a silver Achaemenid coin found in Yerevan, two silver coins of Miletus found during excavations at the fortress of Erebuni, and three old-style silver Athenian tetradrachms found at Sisian (ANRO; also A. Mousheghian, Anabasis 10, 2019).
A note on historiography
Not every researcher treats all of these early pieces as foreign. A paper by G. Vardumyan on mythological imagery in ancient Armenian coinage (PDF) describes the most ancient coins found in Armenia as belonging to the 6th–5th centuries BC and associates them with local Eruanduni (Yervanduni) circles in the Achaemenid period, pointing in particular to lion-head types from Erebuni. The mainstream numismatic reading, followed by the ANRO survey and by Mousheghian, treats the Erebuni pieces as Greek imports and dates the first local royal issues to the 3rd century BC. The question of whether any pre-Hellenistic coinage was struck by or for local dynasts remains open to further die-level and metallurgical study.
The satraps
In the early 4th century BC, the Achaemenid satraps connected with Armenia, Tiribazus and Orontes, issued coins in Asia Minor — at Issus, Mallus and Tarsus in Cilicia and at several Ionian and Mysian towns. There is no evidence that Tiribazus’s coins circulated in Sophene or Lesser Armenia, though circulation in the western districts cannot be excluded. Coins of the Achaemenid satraps of Armenia are generally rare (ANRO).
The wealth of the period is better seen in metalwork than in coinage — for instance the hoard of Achaemenid-style silver rhyta from Erebuni, studied by Mikhail Treister (Ancient Civilizations from Scythia to Siberia 21, 2015).
3. The Hellenistic world: the Attic standard arrives
From the late 4th century BC the Attic weight system gradually penetrated and took root in Armenia. Mousheghian and Manasaryan give the units as follows (with their Armenian equivalents):
UnitWeightArmenian termTalentc. 26.20 kgtaghand (տաղանդ)Minac. 436.6 gmnas (մնաս)Drachmc. 4.366 gdram (դրամ)Obolc. 0.728 goboghos (օբօղոս)Chalkosc. 0.091 gkaghkos (քաղկոս)
One talent equalled 60 minae, one mina 100 drachms, one drachm 6 obols and one obol 8 chalkoi. The gold stater (c. 8.6 g) appears in Armenian sources as sater (սատեր) but played little role; payment was mainly in silver. The gold:silver ratio was roughly 1:10, so a stater was worth about twenty silver drachms (ANRO).
This is the root of the modern word: the Armenian dram is the drachm, and Armeniapedia notes that the word means “money” and is cognate with the Greek drachma.
The commonest coins of the period were the silver drachms and tetradrachms of Alexander the Great and his successors, minted at Babylon, Miletus, Ephesus and other centres that traded with Armenia. Gold issues of Alexander are comparatively scarce on the Highland, unlike in the north-west Caucasus. Later in the 3rd–2nd centuries BC, Seleucid coins (Antiochus IV, Demetrius I, Alexander Balas and others), Phoenician tetradrachms from Aradus, Sidon and Tyre, and drachms of the Cappadocian kings Ariarathes IV and V and Ariobarzanes I circulated in Armenian cities (ANRO).
4. Sophene and Commagene: the first Armenian royal coins (3rd century BC)
The first coins issued by Armenian rulers were struck for the kings of Sophene (in today’s south-eastern Turkey) in the 3rd century BC (CoinWeek, “Ancient Coinage of Armenia”). Sophene was ruled by a branch of the Armenian Orontid dynasty, and its kings issued bronze only (CoinWeek, “Ancient Coins of the Kingdom of Sophene”).
Arsames (c. 255–225 BC) struck copper pieces with his royal portrait and a Greek legend; one type shows a diademed, tiara-wearing bust on the obverse and a nude Heracles with club on the reverse.
Xerxes (c. 220 BC) issued rare bronzes with a folded-tiara portrait and a Nike on the reverse.
Later Sophenian kings such as Arkathias (2nd century BC) are known from a few types.
Because these coins were copper, they served local small-scale trade rather than international exchange; they are known mostly from hoards in the Sophene region and probably came from the city of Arsamosata (ANRO). The Orontid–Hellenistic kingdom of Commagene is the other early centre of Armenian-royal coinage mentioned by Mousheghian. For a modern, searchable record of these coins, see the ANRO archive of Sophene and Commagene.
5. The Artaxiad kingdom: coins of an empire (c. 190–1 BC)
With Artaxias I (c. 190–160 BC), who united the Armenian lands in a single monarchy, Great Armenia acquired its own royal coinage. His small bronzes — dichalka — are notable for Aramaic legends and a bearded head in an upright, peaked royal cap (CoinWeek). Mousheghian lists the Artaxiad sequence from Artaxias I to Tigranes VI, with the exact regnal dates differing slightly between authors (ANRO; the standard catalogues are P. Z. Bedoukian, Coinage of the Artaxiads of Armenia (1978), Y. T. Nercessian, Armenian Coins and Their Values (1995), and F. L. Kovacs, Armenian Coinage in the Classical Period (2016)).
Tigranes I and Tigranes II the Great
Coins of Tigranes I (c. 123/121–96 BC) carry the Greek legend “Great King Tigranes, Philhellene” and circulated mainly in the south-west of the Highland (CoinWeek).
Tigranes II the Great (c. 95–56 BC) created a genuine imperial coinage. His series, struck at Artaxata and Tigranocerta in Armenia and at Antioch and Damascus in Syria, bear the legend Basileos Basileon Tigranou — “of Tigranes, King of Kings”. The classic silver tetradrachm shows the king’s head in the Armenian tiara decorated with a star between two eagles; the reverse shows the Tyche of Antioch seated on a rock, with the river-god Orontes swimming at her feet, often within a laurel wreath (Silver database, tetradrachms of Artaxata, 77–72 BC; drachms of Artaxata, 78–72 BC). The Silver database records a die study of the Artaxata drachms by Nercessian (2006), and a Brussels-based project catalogues overstrikes of Tigranes’s bronzes on earlier coins of Damascus, Antioch and Aradus (example).
Two features stand out:
No gold was struck by Tigranes II or any other Artaxiad ruler; the system was silver and copper.
His copper coinage was meant for local markets and is rarely found outside Armenia and Syria, while the silver was used in international trade. As CoinWeek puts it, no reign has posed more problems for numismatists than that of Tigranes (see the survey). The ANRO Tigranes Die Study is a continuing effort to resolve them.
Tigranes’s reverses carry Nike, Tyche, a lion’s head, a cornucopia and the national hero-god Vahagn, identified with Heracles. The dating on his coins follows the Seleucid era.
Later Artaxiads: sun-god, queen and Rome
Artavasdes II (56–34 BC) kept the title “King of Kings” but added the epithet theou (“divine”), dated by his own regnal years, and placed on his silver a quadriga with a central figure, which Mousheghian reads as an allusion to the Armenian sun-god Areg.
Tigranes III (20–8 BC) was the first Armenian ruler shown full-length with an orb.
Tigranes IV and Erato (c. 2 BC–1 AD) — a king and his sister-queen installed under Roman influence — appear together on rare bronzes. This is the first time a queen’s portrait appears on an Armenian coin (ANRO).
In the Roman period, Armenian numismatics increasingly tells a story of two empires. The coinage of Armenia’s last Artaxiads is classified by Anahit Mousheghian as Armeno-Roman, and denarii of the 1st–2nd centuries AD circulated widely in Armenian markets (Anabasis 10).
6. Rome, Parthia and the city-coinage of Artaxata
After the fall of the Artaxiads, no Armenian king minted coins for a long time. The Arsacid kings of Armenia (from AD 54/66) did not strike their own coins; only the central Parthian branch of the dynasty had that right (ANRO). Yet Armenia appears constantly on Roman coins:
Coins of Mark Antony (35 BC) were the first to depict the full Armenian crown and the legend ARMENIA.
Augustan issues show Armenia as a conquered bull or a young king begging for a captive soldier; a silver didrachm commemorates the coronation of Zeno-Artaxias by Germanicus in AD 18.
Coins of Trajan (AD 115–117), Antoninus Pius (c. 140; coronation of King Sohaemus) and Lucius Verus/Marcus Aurelius commemorate the conquest and the investiture of Armenian kings.
On the Highland itself, hoards from this era — most famously the Garni hoard, which contains Roman silver from Vespasian to Commodus (the latest coin dating to 182–192) — show that Roman denarii effectively served as Armenia’s silver money in the 2nd century AD. A Sasanian drachm of Ardashir I found at Garni in 1963 reveals the beginning of the next monetary era.
Artaxata itself issued small civic bronzes bearing the city’s name. Mousheghian dates this coinage to AD 181–183, calling Artaxata the first Armenian city to put its name on coins; the same article’s illustration, however, shows an Artaxata civic bronze dated to 55/4 BC, and the dating of these issues is a live question in the literature. (See our related article on the 1st-century BC civic bronze from Artaxata, linked at the end of this piece.)
7. Late antiquity: Sasanian drachms and Byzantine gold
By the 3rd–5th centuries the dominant silver currency was the Sasanian drachm of about 4 g, since Roman silver had become heavily debased. In the later 4th century local imitations of late Roman coins appear, as shown by a hoard from Yerevan, and Byzantine gold circulated in the trading city of Dvin.
A remarkable special case is the series of Sasanian drachms struck in Armenia under Yazdegerd I, Peroz, Balash, Kavad I, Khosrow I, Hormizd IV, Khosrow II and Ardashir III. They are purely Sasanian in weight and design and differ only by an abbreviated Pahlavi legend naming Armenia. A tiny silver piece of Shapur — the son of Yazdegerd I — may be tied to his enthronement as king of Armenia in 416–420, a story preserved by Movses Khorenatsi (ANRO).
In the 6th–7th centuries Persian and Byzantine coins circulated side by side; finds from Dvin and from the Leninakan hoard record the shifting frontier between the two empires. Gold in Armenian sources was called dahekan (դահեկան).
8. Arminiya: the Arab Caliphate
After the Arab conquest the Highland formed part of the province of Arminiya. The first Umayyad coin struck in Armenia dates to AH 78 (AD 697/8), after Caliph Abd al-Malik’s monetary reform. Most Umayyad copper fulus with the mint mark “Arminiya” seem to have been struck at Dvin (Arabic Dabil), the administrative centre. Abbasid coins followed, with dirhams and copper coins minted at Dvin, Bardha’a and other towns until AH 332 (AD 943/4). Over 200 Abbasid governors of Armenia and Albania appear on coins from 759 to 833 (ANRO).
The Armenian word dram was now used to render the Arabic dirham, dahekan the dinar, and pogh (փող) the copper fals.
9. Bagratids, Kiurikids and the Mongol age (9th–14th centuries)
The emergence of the Bagratid kingdom of Ani is a political milestone, but it is not matched by an Armenian royal coinage. According to Mousheghian, there is no evidence — in coin hoards or otherwise — that the Bagratid kings or princes of Shirak minted their own coins; the Abbasid dirham remained the main silver of the 9th–10th centuries, with the emirs’ issues of the Sajids and Sallarids as lesser components. In the 10th–11th centuries, Byzantine gold and copper dominated, and in Ani a large hoard of Byzantine coppers has been found.
A first real Armenian-language coinage after antiquity appears only after the Byzantine annexation of Ani. The Lori branch of the Bagratids under Kiurike II (1048–1100) struck copper coins of Byzantine type, with the image of Christ and an Armenian legend invoking God’s help for Kiurike the kouropalates (ANRO).
Through the 12th–13th centuries, Armenian markets used Seljuk copper, Georgian copper coins of Queen Tamar and Queen Rusudan, and later the silver dirhams of the Seljuks of Rum and the Mongols. Under Abaqa Khan (1265–81), the Ilkhanids even struck coppers with trilingual inscriptions in Mongol, Arabic and Armenian — a cross in the centre and religious formulas aimed at the Christian population. Ani minted a copper coin with a human figure under Sulayman Khan (1339–44). The Ilkhanid reform of Ghazan Khan introduced a new silver system around 1300, but silver was soon debased.
10. Cilician Armenia: the kingdom of the tram (1198/99–1375)
The Armenian kingdom of Cilicia, founded by the Rubenid Levon I, is the zenith of medieval Armenian coinage. Wealth from East–West trade produced “some of the most handsome and popular medieval coins” in the collectors’ market (CoinWeek, “Coins of Medieval Armenia”).
Levon I (1198/99–1219) issued the silver tram on a lighter flan with the king enthroned on one side and a lion with a cross on the other (The Met, Tram of Levon I); a large copper piece, the tank, was also issued. His coronation issue has four lions, and some of the thin silver types are what numismatists call “bracteates” because the design shows on both sides.
Hetoum I (1226–70) and Queen Zabel unite the Hetumid and Rubenid houses on a rare double-portrait coin (The Met). In a period of forced alliance with the Seljuks of Rum (c. 1228–1245), Hetoum also struck bilingual trams with Armenian text on one face and the Arabic name of the Seljuk sultan (Kayqubad or Kaykhusraw) on the other (The Met, Tram of Het’um I).

https://allinnet.info/antiquities/the-history-of-armenian-coinage-and-money-from-ancient-times-to-the-dram/

#armenian #ancienttimes #silver #history #dram #money #armeniannumismatics #sophene #great

#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Weapons of the Armenian Highland: From the First Swords to the ...

2026-10-25T00:35:47Z

Weapons of the Armenian Highland: From the First Swords to the Age of Firearms

Military history series · Armenian Highland, 4th millennium BCE – 18th century CE
Introduction: why the Highland matters for the history of arms
The Armenian Highland sits at a crossroads of ore-bearing mountains, horse-breeding uplands and the great routes between Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Iran and the Caucasus. That position made it a place where weapons were both made and tested: the oldest known swords come from its western fringe, one of the best-preserved Bronze Age chariot assemblages comes from the shore of Lake Sevan, and the Urartian kings left thousands of inscribed helmets, shields and arrowheads dedicated to their god Haldi.
This article follows the sources, not the legends. For each period it separates three kinds of evidence: archaeological finds (what has actually been dug up), contemporary written sources (Hittite, Assyrian, Urartian, Greek, Roman, Armenian), and later reconstruction (museum labels, popular summaries, modern estimates). Where a claim rests on a single source or an inscription that scholars read in different ways, the text says so. Clickable references are given inline and collected at the end.
A note on scope and framing. The article follows the Highland’s weapons through one continuous history: the Hayasa-Azzi confederation of the Hittite records, the Kingdom of Van (Urartu, the biblical Ararat), the Orontid and Artaxiad kingdoms, the Arsacid and Bagratid states and Cilician Armenia are treated as successive chapters of Armenian statehood on its own land. The grounds are documentary, genetic and material, set out in the section on continuity near the end: the Behistun inscription names the Urartian land Armenia, ancient DNA shows regional continuity from the Chalcolithic, and the fortress-and-metalworking traditions run from Lchashen through Karmir Blur to the medieval kingdoms.
1. The first metal weapons (5th–3rd millennium BCE)
The Dvin and Yerevan hoards
Before swords there were daggers and axes. In 2018 a hoard of seven daggers and six adzes was found on a hilltop near the village of Dvin in the Ararat plain; the excavators, Boris Gasparyan and Sergei Korenevskiy, date it to the late 5th–early 4th millennium BCE and note that X-ray diffraction shows the objects are made of arsenic bronze. They also point out that hoards of weapons from this early stage are very rare in the Caucasus and the Near East, and that the Dvin find belongs to the same metalworking region as the earlier Yerevan hoard, only about 13 km away. The daggers are small — roughly 18 to 25 cm — and the adzes have blades curved enough to resemble battle axes. See the original report: Gasparyan & Korenevskiy, “An Early Bronze Age Hoard of Bronze Tools from Dvin, Central Armenia”.
Arslantepe: the oldest swords yet found
The earliest swords known anywhere come from Arslantepe near Malatya, a mound on the Upper Euphrates plain that UNESCO inscribed in 2021. It lies on the western fringe of the Highland’s cultural sphere (classical Melitene), not in the heartland, but its metallurgy belongs to the same ore-and-trade network. Marcella Frangipane’s Italian expedition found a cache of nine swords and daggers in a “hall of weapons” beside the palace complex, dated to roughly the 33rd–31st centuries BCE. They are cast in an arsenic–copper alloy, measure about 45–60 cm (so they can be called either long daggers or short swords), and three were inlaid with silver. Analyses of two of them gave arsenic contents of about 2.65–3.15 percent. UNESCO’s own description reads the find as the beginning of organised combat as the privilege of an elite who displayed such arms as symbols of new political power. Summary with references: Melid/Arslantepe overview; background on the finds: Historic Mysteries.
The Arslantepe palace was destroyed around 3000 BCE, after which Kura-Araxes pottery appears in the area, a culture linked to the Highland and the Caucasus. Arsenical copper remained the standard Kura-Araxes alloy, as discussed in a regional survey of South Caucasian metallurgy (note: an open-access aggregation page; consult the original volume for page references).
2. Middle and Late Bronze Age: Metsamor, Lchashen and the chariot
By the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE the Highland had fortified settlements and rich barrow cemeteries. The archaeologists’ label for the culture of the Ararat plain, Lake Sevan and Shirak is the Lchashen–Metsamor culture, dated roughly 1500–700 BCE, marked by cyclopean fortresses and a strong bronze industry. Metsamor is the best-known metallurgical centre, with slag heaps and tools and weapons in bronze and, later, iron.
The most spectacular evidence comes from Lchashen on Lake Sevan, excavated from the 1950s when the falling lake exposed the cemeteries. Burials of the Late Bronze Age (from about 1500 BCE) contained two- and four-wheeled wooden vehicles and chariots, horse bits, bronze swords with sheaths, battle axes, mirrors and bronze models of chariots; many are in the History Museum of Armenia in Yerevan (site summary; Armenia Discovery). A dagger from Lchashen dated to the 15th–14th centuries BCE has a hollow cylindrical hilt with a hemispherical, wood-inlaid pommel and a sheath embossed with a crawling serpent (History Museum of Armenia, inv. 2007-122).
Two cautions apply. First, the chariots were funerary goods; they show that chariots were known and prized, not how they were used in battle. Second, many popular summaries repeat broad claims (“the oldest wheeled vehicles in the world”) that depend on how “oldest” is defined; the safe statement is that Lchashen preserves unusually complete wooden vehicles from the second half of the 2nd millennium BCE.
3. The Hurrian–Mitanni world: chariots, horses and the maryannu
To the south and west of the Ararat plain, in the upper Euphrates–Tigris region, the kingdom of Mitanni (c. 1475–1275 BCE) was ruled by a warrior elite called the maryannu over a mainly Hurrian-speaking population (World History Encyclopedia). The Hurrian world is the older cultural layer of the Armenian Highland: Hurrian is the closest known relative of Urartian, and the Hurrian homeland is generally sought in and around the Highland. Mitanni is remembered above all for its chariotry. The famous Kikkuli text, found in the Hittite archives at Hattusa, is a cuneiform manual for conditioning chariot horses, written in the name of a master horse trainer of the land of Mitanni; it prescribes a regimen of roughly 214 days and is dated to about the 14th century BCE (Kikkuli overview; Archaeology magazine on Near Eastern chariot horses).
Why does this belong in a history of the Highland’s weapons? Because the Hurrian–Mitanni world and the Highland formed one contact zone: Mitanni’s western neighbour and ally was the Hurrian-speaking border state of Isuwa, around Arslantepe, and the Hittites and Mitanni competed for the Highland itself. The Mitanni evidence shows the technology of war on the Highland’s southern and western edge — the spoked-wheel light chariot, selectively bred and trained horses, and a ruling class defined by chariot service — and the same package appears in the chariot burials of Lchashen, contemporary with Mitanni’s rise.
4. Hayasa-Azzi and the Hittites (14th–13th centuries BCE)
The earliest Armenian state known by name is Hayasa-Azzi, a confederation east of the Hittite homeland, attested in the Hittite archives of the 14th–13th centuries BCE. Its name, Hayasa, is the source of the Armenians’ own name for themselves, Hay, and of Hayastan (overview of the sources; Fundamental Armenology). The sources are Hittite and therefore one-sided, but they show a society able to raid Hittite border towns, fortify frontier cities and field charioteers.
The Hukkana treaty. King Suppiluliuma I secured the Hittite eastern flank before his war on Mitanni by making a treaty with Hukkana of Hayasa and giving him his sister in marriage. According to Robert Ghazaryan’s reading, a central purpose was to detach the countries of the Highland from Mitanni and obtain military support from them (Ghazaryan, Hukkana’s Treaty; see also Fundamental Armenology on the Hittite sources). Igor Diakonoff reads the treaty as obliging Hayasa to give military aid and notes that Azzian warriors later served as charioteers in the Hittite army, so chariots and horses were evidently known to them (Diakonoff, chapter 5).
Mursili II’s campaigns. After Suppiluliuma’s death the new Azzian king Anniya resumed hostilities. Mursili II attacked the border fortress of Ura and fought Hayasa in his seventh to tenth years; the Hittite general Nuvanza won a decisive field battle at Ganuvara (Battle of Ganuvara). After Anniya’s defeat Hayasa-Azzi no longer appears in the records as a unified power.
The Hittite texts do not describe Hayasan weapons item by item. What they establish is the military profile: fortified frontier towns, chariot-capable forces, and a state important enough to need treaties and royal marriages — the profile that Lchashen and the later Urartian fortresses fill in with material evidence.
5. Nairi and the Kingdom of Van (Urartu), 9th–7th centuries BCE
The richest weapons evidence of the whole Highland belongs to the Kingdom of Van (Urartu, the biblical Ararat), the Armenian Highland’s great Iron Age state. Assyrian inscriptions first show it consolidating under Sarduri I in the mid-9th century BCE, and it built fortresses across the Highland, including Teishebaini (Karmir Blur) and Erebuni. Darius I’s Behistun inscription later names the same country Armenia, giving Urartu’s Akkadian name Urashtu as the equivalent of Old Persian Armina (see the site’s A Painted Wall from Ancient Armenia: The New Erebuni Fresco and the Urartian-Armenian Continuity, “Summon Against Her the Kingdoms of Ararat”: Urartu-Armenia in the Prophecy Against Babylon).
What was in the arsenal
Dedicated and excavated finds, together with the royal inscriptions, show iron and bronze swords, spears and javelins, bows, helmets, shields and scale armour for the elite (World History Encyclopedia). A recent study of Urartian arrowheads lists helmets, shields, swords, knives, daggers, maces, spearheads and arrowheads as the standard weapon categories and records that arrowheads at Karmir Blur, Upper Anzaf and Çavuştepe are often inscribed (Dergipark article).
The best-documented pieces are royal dedications to Haldi:
Helmets. A helmet from Karmir Blur bears a cuneiform inscription of Sarduri, son of Argishti, offering it to Haldi.
Shields. Fourteen bronze shields were excavated at Karmir Blur, with others in the British Museum and in Berlin; their large bosses carry lions, bulls or composite creatures.
Quivers. Only three royal bronze quivers are known; all came from Teishebaini and show warriors in relief (Art of Urartu; see also the Hermitage quiver of Sarduri II).
Votive arsenals. At Ayanis, King Rusa II’s fortress temple, arrows, quivers, helmets, shields and spears were left as offerings, and an inscription at the Meherkapı niche refers to sacrifice to Haldi’s weapons (Dergipark).
The quantity and standardisation of this metalwork is itself a historical fact: Urartian kings ran palace workshops and stored arms by the thousand in citadels such as Teishebaini.
Assyrian testimony: Sargon II in 714 BCE
The principal outside description of Urartian military power is Sargon II’s letter to the god Ashur on his eighth campaign (714 BCE). The Assyrian king crossed the mountains south of Lake Urmia, defeated the Urartian king Rusa I, whose cavalry was caught off balance, and sacked the temple city of Muṣaṣir, home of Haldi’s sanctuary. The booty list quoted in the secondary literature records numbers of shields, spearheads and daggers in the tens or hundreds of thousands (the Dergipark paper cites the standard translation by Luckenbill). Such figures are royal propaganda and should be read as signs of abundance, not as inventories. An Armenian academic assessment emphasises that Sargon’s success came from a surprise attack led by his elite troops on Rusa’s headquarters and cavalry, cutting the Urartian command from its units (summary in Patma-Banasirakan Handes); the route of the whole campaign, about 1,600 km in roughly three and a half months, is reconstructed by Artak Sargsyan. Urartu lost the battle but not its arsenals: the fortresses of the Ararat plain stood for another century.
6. The Orontids and Achaemenid Armenia (6th–4th centuries BCE)
Under the Persian Empire, Armenia was a satrapy and a source of troops. Herodotus describes the national contingents in Xerxes’ army of 480 BCE and says that the Armenians were equipped like the Phrygians, with a shared commander, Artochmes, Darius’ son-in-law (Hdt. 7.73, Perseus translation; Harland’s annotated translation of the passage). The passage is valuable because it shows Armenian infantry organised alongside Anatolian troops under a common panoply and an Achaemenid-court commander. Herodotus’ remark that the Armenians were settlers from Phrygia is a Greek tradition that genomics has rejected: the 2020 whole-genome study found no support for Balkan-related ancestry and tied ancient and modern Armenians to the Highland’s own population (see the continuity section). No Orontid-period arsenal has been excavated on the scale of Karmir Blur, so this chapter rests mainly on Greek texts and later Hellenistic evidence.
7. The Artaxiad kingdom: cataphracts and Tigranes the Great
Under Tigranes II (the Great, r. c. 95–55 BCE) Greater Armenia reached its largest extent, and its signature arm was the heavy cavalryman, the cataphract, armoured rider and horse. At the Battle of Tigranocerta (69 BCE), the Roman force of Lucullus broke the Armenian cataphracts first; the army’s remaining levies, mostly raw troops from across the empire, then panicked (Battle of Tigranocerta). The ancient numbers are not reliable: Appian gives 250,000 infantry and 50,000 cavalry for Tigranes, and the Romans’ own strength is stated differently by Plutarch and Appian. A study by Berj Sapaghian, working from the silver booty Lucullus distributed, argues that the Armenian army could not have exceeded about 80,000 and that Lucullus’ force was far larger than the 15,000 usually quoted (abstract).
What the sources agree on is the combination: armoured lancers and horse archers in the Iranian manner, supported by foot levies and by the fortified royal cities, Tigranocerta and Artaxata.
8. Arsacid Armenia and the Mamikonian sparapets (1st–5th centuries CE)
In the Arsacid and early Christian period the Armenian nobility’s cavalry became a prized contingent in both the Roman and Persian armies. In the Armenian revolt of 451, the sparapet Vardan Mamikonian led an army that the tradition counts at about 66,000 against a Sasanian force with elite cavalry and war elephants at Avarayr. The Armenians lost the field and their commander but forced the Persians to abandon the attempt to impose Zoroastrianism (Battle of Avarayr; Vardan Mamikonian). The contemporary accounts (Yeghishe, Ghazar Parpetsi) are narrative, not technical; they tell us how the war was fought, not what each rider carried.
9. The Middle Ages: Bagratids, Artsrunis and the long sword
From the 9th century the sources improve. Chroniclers such as Tovma Artsruni and Hovhannes Drasxanakertsi describe sword, helmet and lamellar-plate equipment, and a rich body of reliefs and miniatures survives. Dmytro Dymydyuk’s studies, the first systematic military reading of this imagery, conclude that the Armenian equipment of the Bagratid era (884–1045) resembled Byzantine arms but also shows Muslim influence:
A catalogue-style poster identifies roughly eighteen weapon types in the texts (swords, bows, slings, javelins, daggers, hammers, clubs, maces, axes and spears with varied heads, including a long hooked spear used by foot against cavalry) and notes that Armenia was a source of high-quality steel (bulat).
The 1134 wooden door of Msho Arakelots Monastery shows four cavalrymen with round shields, spears and swords (article).
The reliefs and frescoes of the Church of the Holy Cross on Aghtamar (915–921) show swords with sleeve cross-guards; the question of what such images teach us about real swords is

https://allinnet.info/antiquities/weapons-of-the-armenian-highland-from-the-first-swords-to-the-age-of-firearms/

#armenianhighland #firstswords #bronzeage #firearms #weapons #dvin #agehoard #bce #lakesevan

#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Shamiram 2026: A Bronze Age Horse Burial, an Urartian Megalithic ...

2026-10-22T19:16:28Z

Shamiram 2026: A Bronze Age Horse Burial, an Urartian Megalithic Tower and Three Thousand Years of Continuous Life on the Aragats Foothills

How the 2026 Armenian-Italian field season at the Shamiram fortress and necropolis in Aragatsotn adds to the long history of Central Armenia, from Late Bronze Age elites to the Kingdom of Van and the Hellenistic era
In brief
Who and when. The Joint Armenian-Italian Archaeological Mission worked at Shamiram, Aragatsotn Province, from 26 May to 25 June 2026. It is directed by Varduhi Melikyan (Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, National Academy of Sciences of Armenia) and Roberto Dan (ISMEO), according to the Institute’s season-closing announcement and the Armenpress report.
The headline find. Continued excavation of Tomb No. 3, a monumental Late Bronze Age burial with concentric stone circles, a central stone chamber, bronze weapons, obsidian and metal arrowheads, and the remains of a ritually sacrificed horse (Armenpress).
A rare stratigraphic sequence. Behind a tower of the Urartian fortress, a Middle Iron Age room with fire and destruction layers was found, together with a burial that is older than the Urartian defensive system (News.am).
Monumental Urartian masonry. Tower 3 revealed a well-preserved megalithic structure of about 8.5 × 8.5 m (Armenpress).
Long afterlife. Evidence of reuse and rebuilding from the Hellenistic period through the Late Antique, medieval and post-medieval eras.
Funding. The project is co-funded by Italy’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, with the support of the Italian Embassy in Yerevan (Armenpress).
The site: a fortified plateau and a necropolis of thousands of tombs
Shamiram lies in the Aragatsotn region of Armenia. Italy’s ANSA news agency, reporting on a June 2026 visit by the Italian Ambassador, describes a fortified complex together with a vast adjoining necropolis of roughly five thousand tombs marked by stone circles on the ground. The same report singles out the fifth defensive wall, attributed to the Urartian period of the 7th century BC, which runs for more than 300 metres and encloses about seven hectares, one of the largest known for that era.
The scale is not new information. An Institute report from the 2020 season already described the fifth wall as 320 m long and 3.5 m wide, with four large towers and wall foundations along the canyon, and noted that excavation of the tomb field on the left bank of the ravine had begun under Varduhi Melikyan. The Institute also recorded that the fortress, originally built in the Urartian period, was used and rebuilt in later centuries, with stones from its walls reused in village houses and outbuildings into the 20th century.
The European Heritage Hub, whose partner SIREH ran a student workshop on site on 23 June 2026, calls Shamiram one of the largest and most complex fortified settlements in central Armenia, with at least six lines of walls across a broad rocky plateau. It adds that recent campaigns exposed a monumental fortification system attributed to the late phase of the Kingdom of Urartu, and evidence of occupation through the Orontid and Artaxiad periods into the medieval era.
The Institute’s own summary of the 2026 results lists an exceptional continuity of occupation: Late Bronze Age, Iron Age, Urartian, post-Urartian, Hellenistic, Late Antique, medieval and post-medieval (News.am).
Tomb No. 3: elite burial and the horse
What was reported
According to the Armenpress account of the Institute’s statement, Tomb No. 3 is a monumental Late Bronze Age burial featuring:
concentric stone circles;
a central stone burial chamber;
rich grave goods, including bronze weapons;
obsidian and metal arrowheads;
the remains of a ritually sacrificed horse.
The Institute argues that this provides important new evidence on local elites, funerary practice and the symbolic role of the horse in Late Bronze Age communities of Armenia.
The English-language outlet Greek Reporter dates the tomb to roughly 1600-1200 BC and stresses that the multi-ring design implies careful planning and a considerable labour force. Note that this is the outlet’s own framing: the Institute’s release, as quoted by Armenpress, says only “Late Bronze Age”, and a published radiocarbon or typological dating from the mission is still to come.
The regional context of horse burial
The horse was central to elite identity across the Armenian Highlands long before the Urartian kings.
At Lchashen on Lake Sevan, excavations from the 1950s exposed hundreds of Bronze Age graves. World History Encyclopedia notes skeletons of horses and oxen linked to carts among the grave goods. A summary of the Lchashen wagon dates the best-preserved four-wheeled canopy wagon to the 15th-14th centuries BC and describes wheeled vehicles accompanying leaders in death.
A scholarly study of horse sacrifice in Bronze and Early Iron Age Armenian burials argues that the horse was understood as linked to the world of the dead, and possibly as a mediator between worlds.
At Aghavnatun, on the southern slopes of Mount Aragats, a 2021 paper by Nachmias, Bar-Oz, Nadel, Petrosyan and Gasparyan reported a complete stallion in a 15-metre monumental tomb, radiocarbon dated to about 2130 ± 20 BP (a much later, Hellenistic-period burial), whose morphology resembles the famed Nisean horse. The authors link the burial to horse breeding in the Ararat Depression, and the full text places it within the Highlands’ ancient reputation as horse-breeding country.
Taken together, Shamiram’s Tomb No. 3 sits at the earlier end of a long Highland tradition: Late Bronze Age horse sacrifice near Aragats, then the Lchashen chariot elites, and much later the Aghavnatun stallion. Bear in mind that these are different periods and different burial types; the comparison shows regional continuity of horse symbolism, not a single unbroken rite.
Before the Urartian fortress: a destroyed Iron Age room and an older burial
Among the season’s most scientifically interesting results is the one that attracted the least headline attention. The Institute reports that in the area behind one of the towers of the Urartian fortification, archaeologists found a Middle Iron Age room with substantial destruction layers, followed by a burial that predates the construction of the Urartian defensive circuit. In the Institute’s words, as relayed by News.am, this sequence offers a rare opportunity to examine the transformation of a local Iron Age centre before and during the expansion of the Kingdom of Van in the Ararat region.
Why does this matter? The standard picture of Urartian expansion into the Ararat plain is driven by royal inscriptions. Wikipedia’s summary of Argishti I’s campaigns records raids from about 786 BC, the founding of Erebuni in 782 BC, and the foundation of Argishtikhinili in 776 BC. UNESCO’s tentative-list file on Yerevan notes that Argishti’s conquest of the Ararat Valley is commemorated in his inscription at the Tushpa cliffs. But kings’ inscriptions describe conquest from the conqueror’s side. Stratified rooms and graves tell us what was already there: a settled local community with its own dead, its own buildings, and, at Shamiram, a destruction layer.
The Institute does not say who caused the burning, and this should not be guessed. What can be said is that the new data allow a direct archaeological test of what Urartian expansion meant locally: abrupt violent replacement, gradual incorporation, or something in between. The question has been raised independently by Austrian and Armenian researchers at Aramus, where radiocarbon-dated stratigraphy from the 9th to the 4th centuries BC is argued to offer a new perspective on the nature of Urartian dominance in Armenia.
Tower 3 and the gate of Wall 2
Urartian megalithic building
Excavation and cleaning of Tower 3 confirmed the monumental character of the Urartian fortification, exposing a well-preserved megalithic structure of approximately 8.5 × 8.5 metres (Armenpress). Greek Reporter reads this as strengthening the interpretation of Shamiram as a major fortified centre rather than a small rural settlement. That is a reasonable inference from the scale of the walls and towers, though the Institute’s own wording is more cautious.
For comparison, the royal foundation at Erebuni, described by UNESCO as a fortress-city of Argishti I crowning Arin Berd Hill, is documented by 23 stone inscriptions; Shamiram, by contrast, has so far produced a built environment but no comparable royal text in the sources consulted here. That absence is itself worth watching as excavation continues.
The gate of Wall 2: Hellenistic rebuilding
The most interesting architectural result concerns the gate complex of Wall 2. Per Armenpress, the currently visible L-shaped entrance was most likely rebuilt in the Hellenistic period, replacing an earlier Iron Age entrance. In other words, the monument visitors see today is not a pure Urartian gate but an Urartian-era defensive line that was deliberately reworked some four to five centuries later. This fits the picture of a fortress maintained and adapted, not abandoned, after the fall of the Kingdom of Van.
After Urartu: column bases, medieval houses and the persistence of the fortification
The 2026 campaign, the Institute says, opened new perspectives on post-Urartian Shamiram. In Area 7, archaeologists documented column bases, structures abutting the Urartian towers, and well-preserved medieval buildings, which together show how the ancient fortifications continued to shape the spatial organization of the site for centuries (Armenpress).
This post-Urartian chapter connects to the wider history of the region:
The Orontid (Yervanduni) dynasty, according to the Encyclopaedia Iranica, ruled Greater Armenia, Sophene and Commagene across the Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods. Its capital at Armavir is the successor of Urartian Argishtikhinili, and Armeniapedia notes that the Urartian defensive wall and buildings there were still usable and were reused by the Orontid kings.
A 2025 article in the journal Aramazd by Syuzanna Muradyan, on Yervandashat-Yervandakert, concludes that after the fall of the Urartian kingdom its heritage found varied manifestations in the culture of Yervandid Armenia.
In December 2024, Roberto Dan, Varduhi Melikyan and Artur Petrosyan presented a paper at a Rome conference whose title translates as “From protohistoric communities to Urartu and the Orontids: new archaeological discoveries at the site of Shamiram in Armenia” (conference programme, Sapienza University). The mission itself, then, frames the site as a sequence running from pre-Urartian communities through the Kingdom of Van into the Orontid era.
Why Shamiram matters: continuity on one hill
Few places in Armenia allow an archaeologist to follow one locality from a monumental Late Bronze Age tomb, through a destroyed Iron Age room and an Urartian megalithic circuit, into Hellenistic gate-building and medieval houses. The Institute states that the results “once again confirm” Shamiram’s importance for understanding the long-term history of Central Armenia, from Bronze Age funerary traditions and local Iron Age communities to Urartian monumental architecture and later reuse (Institute announcement).
For readers interested in the continuity of the Armenian Highland’s civilizations, three threads stand out:
The same land, the same elites? Tomb No. 3 documents a powerful local warrior aristocracy centuries before the Kingdom of Van, in the same Aragats-Ararat zone later claimed by Argishti I.
Urartian construction on an existing settlement. The pre-Urartian burial and Iron Age room indicate that the Urartian circuit was built on a place with an earlier life, not on an empty plain, a point that complicates the inscriptional image of conquest into emptiness. (Argishti’s own Erebuni text, as quoted in one traveller’s account, speaks of a land that was a desert before his works.)
Reuse across regimes. Hellenistic rebuilding of Wall 2’s gate and the medieval buildings of Area 7 show successive Armenian-era communities inheriting and adapting Urartian stone.
A note on interpretation: specialist and mainstream readings
This site treats the Kingdom of Van (Urartu, Biainili) as an integral part of the Armenian Highland’s continuous history, and the Shamiram sequence is naturally read in that light: same hill, same plateau, successive polities, and a population whose burials and buildings overlap and succeed one another. Readers should know where the evidence ends and interpretation begins.
What the sources establish. A site continuously occupied across the periods listed; Urartian monumental fortifications; Late Bronze Age elite burial; Hellenistic rebuilding of a gate; medieval reuse. These are statements of the excavators.
What remains debated in mainstream scholarship. Whether the population of Urartian Shamiram was ethnically and linguistically continuous with the later Armenian-speaking population is a separate question that stratigraphy alone cannot answer. The ethnic and linguistic identity of Urartu’s ruling elite is a long-running subject of academic discussion; for one example, a chapter by Armen Petrosyan, “On the Ethnic Origin of the Ruling Elite of Urartu”, appears in an edited volume co-edited by Avetisyan, Dan and Grekyan. The Italian-Armenian authors of a 30-year review of Italian Urartological archaeology in Armenia likewise tie their work to the broader process of Armenian ethnogenesis, which they treat as a research problem rather than a settled matter.
What the 2026 data do not yet show. No published radiocarbon dates, osteological identification of the horse, isotopic or DNA results, or detailed excavation plans accompany the press releases. The Institute says anthropological and archaeozoological analyses will continue (Institute announcement).
What to watch next
Dating of Tomb No. 3: calibrated radiocarbon dates would test the 1600-1200 BC range cited in the press and place the tomb relative to the Lchashen-Metsamor horizon.
The archaeozoological study of the horse: size, age, sex and any traces of harness or bit would connect it to the Highland horse-breeding tradition discussed above.
Absolute dating of the destruction layer behind the Urartian tower, which would help determine whether it reflects pre-Urartian conflict, the Urartian conquest itself, or later events.
Final publication of the Wall 2 gate sequence, to show exactly what Hellenistic builders replaced.
Related articles on this site
Erebuni and the founding of Yerevan in 782 BC: placeholder link
Yervand I and the Orontid dynasty: placeholder link
The Lchashen-Metsamor bronze chariot model: placeholder link
Urartian fortresses of the Ararat plain, from Karmir Blur to Argishtikhinili: placeholder link
Sources and further reading
Primary announcements by the excavators
Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, NAS RA, The 2026 Archaeological Excavation Season at Shamiram Has Successfully Concluded (7 July 2026)
Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Archaeological Excavations Continue at the Fortress and Cemetery Field of Shamiram (2020 season)
Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, 2020 season summary and later reuse of the fortress
News reports on the 2026 season
Armenpress, Armenian-Italian archaeological mission makes new discoveries at Shamiram site
News.am, Excavations in Armenia’s Shamiram village reveal important data about site’s pre-Urartian phases
ANSA, Amb. Ferranti visits the Shamiram archaeological site (12 June 2026)
Greek Reporter, 3,000-Year-Old Tomb in Armenia Reveals Elite Burial With Bronze Weapons, Sacrificed Horse
Georgia Today, Archaeologists uncover major Late Bronze Age burial complex at Armenia’s Shamiram site
European Heritage Hub, SIREH workshop at Shamiram
Scholarly and background literature
Nachmias, Bar-Oz, Nadel, Petrosyan, Gasparyan, “A monumental horse burial in the Armenian Highlands”, Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia 49/3 (2021), full text
“Horse sacrifice in funeral rites (based on the Bronze and Early Iron Age burials in Armenia)”
Kuntner, Avetisyan, Heinsch, “The Fortress of Aramus in its Historical Context”
Biscione, Dan, Gasparyan, Hmayakyan, Petrosyan, “Tra il lago Sevan e l’Arasse: Trent’anni di archeologia Urartologica italiana in Armenia (1994-2023)”, Bollettino della Società Geografica

https://allinnet.info/archeology/shamiram-2026-a-bronze-age-horse-burial-an-urartian-megalithic-tower-and-three-thousand-years-of-continuous-life-on-the-aragats-foothills/

#bronzeage #latebronze #shamiram #ironage #armenpress #burial #armenia #aragatsotnprovince #institute #varduhimelikyan

#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

“If I Hadn’t Acted, We Would All Be Dead”: The Shaki Attack ...

2026-10-16T18:58:13Z

“If I Hadn’t Acted, We Would All Be Dead”: The Shaki Attack and the Mother Who Fought Back

On October 1, 2026, an armed Azerbaijani soldier entered a family home in Syunik, Armenia. A wounded mother confronted him with a kitchen knife. Her story has since become a test of how Armenia handles security, public information, and its fragile peace with Baku.
What happened in Shaki
On October 1, an Azerbaijani soldier entered the village of Shaki in Armenia’s Syunik Province and shot a 39-year-old local woman with an assault rifle. Her three children were present, and two of them were injured. The village head, Ruben Manucharyan, confirmed that a man with an automatic rifle had entered a house and wounded the woman in front of her children.
Armenia’s Prosecutor’s Office later confirmed the central facts. The soldier, Nasimi Musayev, unlawfully entered a house around 14:00 and fired after being discovered. He fled, and he was later found at another address in the village.
The mother’s account
The woman, Ani Avetisyan, spoke to RFE/RL’s Armenian Service from a Yerevan hospital. According to her account, she arrived home to find Musayev pointing a rifle at her children. She said he had held them hostage for about 15 minutes. He fired three shots. The first missed. When he aimed at her son, she grabbed the rifle, and in doing so lost her left thumb and badly injured her other fingers. She then fought back with a knife.
Her story has been reported in detail by the Mirror-Spectator. She says she managed to stab Musayev with a kitchen knife before he fled and was caught shortly afterwards. In her words, had she not acted at that moment, neither she nor her children would be alive today. She faces more surgeries.
Her sister, Arpi Avetisyan, told journalists that Ani was in nearby Sisian when one of the children kept a phone line open. She drove to Shaki and climbed a neighbor’s wall to reach the house, even though her children shouted at her not to come because the man was armed. JAMnews reports a further detail from the family: her 15-year-old son also fought the soldier and suffered a broken arm.
Where accounts differ. Early reports by the village head described the woman returning home with her children from school and encountering the intruder. The family’s later account says she was away and rushed in after the children called her. Reports also vary on her age (38 or 39) and on whether “two” or “three” children were held at gunpoint. None of the sources I found states that she took the rifle away from him. They describe her grabbing it, stabbing him, and his fleeing.
Her condition: Armenia’s Health Ministry said she underwent surgery and was in stable condition, with no risk to her life.
The warning that never reached the village
The case quickly became about more than one violent afternoon. Armenia’s National Security Service said that Azerbaijan’s State Security Service had informed it on September 29 that a serviceman had left his unit and might have crossed into Armenia. That was two days before the shooting. Residents of Shaki were not warned.
Avetisyan said that with a warning she would not have sent her children to school and the family would not have stayed in the village. Pashinyan’s explanation was that there was no evidence the serviceman had actually crossed the border.
Azerbaijan’s Prosecutor General’s Office says Musayev went missing from his unit in the Lachin district on September 26. Azerbaijani authorities say there are reasonable grounds to suspect he left his unit without authorization and opened a criminal case. Armenia’s security service had said that only one person crossed the border. The sources do not explain how an armed man crossed unnoticed and reached a village.
The political storm
On October 7, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan called the attack an “ordinary criminal incident” and said that people who call the police should wait for the police to act. He suggested that had the family waited, most likely nothing would have happened. The remarks drew sharp criticism, since the woman was responding to an armed man pointing a weapon at her children.
Avetisyan answered the criticism, noting that the police station in Sisian is closer to Shaki than the hotel where she was when she learned of the intrusion. Many in Armenia hail her as a hero.
Legal fallout and the diplomatic context
Musayev is held in pre-trial detention for two months. The charges include illegal border crossing, smuggling of military-use products, firearms and ammunition, illegal entry into a home, and grievous bodily harm under aggravating circumstances, including with a firearm.
Armenia’s defense minister said Musayev is not considered a saboteur and that he did not resist when detained. Pashinyan said the criminal proceedings will be conducted in Armenia. He also said Azerbaijan has made no extradition request. He added that Armenia would have returned Musayev the same day had he not committed a crime. Pashinyan rejected swapping Musayev for Armenian prisoners held in Baku, and said the incident does not threaten the peace process.
There is precedent for such handovers. JAMnews notes that Armenia returned Elvin Ibrahimov in 2019 via the Red Cross, and Azerbaijan received Huseyn Akhundov in 2023 after he had killed an Armenian man and been sentenced to 20 years.
Why it matters
Three questions remain open:
Border security. How did an armed soldier move undetected for days and reach a settlement?
Public warning. When a neighboring state reports a possible armed crossing, who decides whether residents are told, and on what evidence?
Accountability. Will the trial give the family a full, public accounting?
Whatever the answers, the documented facts are clear. A mother with a kitchen knife, already wounded, confronted a man with a rifle and ended the threat to her children. The broader debate about how Armenia protects its border villages follows from that.
Sources are linked inline. Reports are drawn from Armenian, Azerbaijani, and independent outlets, and details may change as the investigation continues.
Artatsolum
The post “If I Hadn’t Acted, We Would All Be Dead”: The Shaki Attack and the Mother Who Fought Back appeared first on Art-A-Tsolum.

https://allinnet.info/news/if-i-hadnt-acted-we-would-all-be-dead-the-shaki-attack-and-the-mother-who-fought-back/

#foughtback #armenia #acted #musayev #syunikprovince #october #security

#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

An Armenian Bride from Kharberd: A Photograph from the Danish ...

2026-10-16T04:45:35Z

An Armenian Bride from Kharberd: A Photograph from the Danish National Archives

A portrait from the Armenian highlands
Two women stand before a painted studio backdrop of clouds and trees. The taller one, a young woman, wears a sheer lace-like veil over her head and a band of coins across her forehead. Silver or silver-toned coins run down the front of her dark bodice, and a long silk cloak falls from her shoulders to the ground. Beside her, lower in the frame, sits an older woman in a patterned headscarf. The pair are identified in the archive as an Armenian bride and her sister, from Kharberd.
This photograph belongs to the archive of the Danish missionary organization KMA and is held by the Danish National Archives (Rigsarkivet) in Copenhagen. It is a rare visual record of how an Armenian bride from the Kharberd region presented herself in the years before the Armenian Genocide.
Where the photograph is preserved, and what the record says
The picture is reproduced in the article “Harput – Missionaries” on Houshamadyan, a project that reconstructs Ottoman Armenian town and village life. Its caption reads: KMA archives, pre-genocide, “Armenian bride and her sister”, with the source given as Rigsarkivet/Danish National Archives, Copenhagen. The article’s editorial note says the photographs, apart from a few, were provided by the Danish archival historian Matthias Bjørnlund from the Danish National Archives.
The same page shows other KMA material that helps place the photograph. It includes a KMA postcard of “Young Armenian women in national costumes” (ca. 1910) and photographs of Armenian orphans and missionary staff taken around 1908–1912. For the institution itself, see the Danish National Archives.
Who the KMA were, and why their archive holds such images
KMA stands for Kvindelige Missions Arbejdere (“Women Missionary Workers”). According to Bjørnlund’s introduction, the organization was founded in Copenhagen in 1900. It was spurred largely by news of the Hamidian massacres of the 1890s. Armenians remained its main focus until it was dissolved in 1981.
The KMA founded the orphanage Emaus in Mezreh (present-day Elazığ) in November 1902. Danish missionaries then worked across the Kharpert province for years. They included the nurse Maria Jacobsen, who worked from 1907 as head nurse for the American Board in Mezreh and Kharpert, and Karen Marie Petersen, who led Emaus. Their photographs, postcards and annotated prints went back to Denmark and were preserved in the KMA archives. Many carry captions in Danish, written on the back by the missionaries themselves. Jacobsen’s own diaries are a major source on Kharpert; the English edition is Diaries of a Danish Missionary: Harpoot, 1907–1919 (Gomidas Institute, 2001), edited by Ara Sarafian. The Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute notes that part of her materials are in the Danish KMA archives.
Kharberd: the place
Kharberd (Harput/Kharpert) is an Armenian town on a hill above a fertile plain. Houshamadyan’s demographic study by George Aghjayan explains that the seat of government moved in the early 1800s to the lowland settlement of Mezire, later called Mamuretül Aziz.
The same study gives the main figures:
The Armenian population of the Kharpert district stayed at about 40,000 for almost a century.
In 1914 the town of Kharpert had 4,248 Armenians in 714 households.
Armenians made up around a third of the town’s population.
The district had about 70 villages with Armenian inhabitants.
This is the milieu in which the bride lived: a dense, long-established Armenian community with its own churches, schools, craftsmen and customs.
Reading the costume
Armenian dress is region-specific, so it is worth being careful about what a photograph can prove. Houshamadyan’s article on Harput religious customs, by Vahé Tachjian, describes the girl’s wedding clothes, based on Manug Dzeron’s account of the village of Perchendj. They consist of a coloured silk apron (zubun), a jacket sewn with gold thread (çuha salta) and a long veil (chite). Another account (Shahbazian, on Tankaran) gives the bride a coloured headscarf (yazma), a silk dress, a cloth over the bosom (khutni), a woollen coat, many braids and embroidered shoes.
The article also records that engagement gifts included a string of gold coins (khatar of gazis). Betrothal and festival gifts could include a decorated belt (kemer), a woman’s cap (lachag) and a decorated silk cloth.
Several elements of the portrait are consistent with this picture:
the long sheer veil and the silk outer garment;
the coins worn on the forehead and down the bodice;
the decorated belt or apron with hanging cords.
This is an interpretation by comparison. The archive caption does not itemize the garments, and the sources above describe village and plain customs and differ from place to place. The photograph is best read as a studio portrait in festive or bridal attire, not as a standardized “Kharberd bridal costume”. On the broader history, the Armenian Museum of Fresno and EVN Report note that the unified traditional Armenian wedding took shape in the 18th–19th centuries, and that the white wedding dress became established in Armenian culture only after the Second World War. Brides in photographs like this one therefore wear colour, silk and coins, not white.
The studio setting
The painted clouds and trees are a standard photographic-studio backdrop. The portrait was posed, so the clothing was probably chosen and arranged for the camera, as often happened when families had formal portraits made for engagements, weddings or souvenirs. That does not make the costume “staged” in the sense of invented, but it does mean the photo records how the sitters wished to be seen.
Dating
The archive’s caption says “pre-genocide”, that is, before 1915, and gives no year. The KMA presence in Kharpert began in 1901, and the related KMA photographs on the same page date from about 1908 to 1912. That makes the first decade of the 20th century plausible. A date in the late 19th century cannot be excluded from the visible evidence alone, so “late 19th or early 20th century” is a reasonable but unproven range. Establishing a date requires the original print, its verso and the KMA catalogue entry.
Why it matters
After 1915 the Armenian quarters of Kharpert were destroyed. Aghjayan’s study states that the Armenian part of the town lies in ruins and that no one lives there today. Photographs from missionary archives therefore form part of the visual record of the community. Jacobsen’s own diary, with photographs interleaved between its pages, is regarded as an important source on the events of 1915; for a short overview see the Aurora Prize profile. The bride in this picture and her sister are not named. Whether they survived is not known from the sources consulted.
Sources
Harput – Missionaries (Houshamadyan, M. Bjørnlund), source of the photograph’s caption and archival attribution
Harput – Religious customs (Houshamadyan, V. Tachjian)
Harput – Demography (Houshamadyan, G. Aghjayan)
Maria Jacobsen, Diaries of a Danish Missionary: Harpoot, 1907–1919 (catalogue record)
Maria Jacobsen (Wikipedia) and the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute biography
Danish National Archives (Rigsarkivet)
EVN Report on Armenian wedding traditions
Artatsolum
Image Source: Javakheti Georgia
The post An Armenian Bride from Kharberd: A Photograph from the Danish National Archives appeared first on Art-A-Tsolum.

https://allinnet.info/history/an-armenian-bride-from-kharberd-a-photograph-from-the-danish-national-archives/

Written in Wool, Carved in Stone: The Khachkar, the Carpet, and ...

2026-10-16T03:54:03Z

Written in Wool, Carved in Stone: The Khachkar, the Carpet, and the Struggle to Name Armenian Weaving

A 19th-century Baluch rug beside a 13th-century khachkar from Hovhannavank: a shared design logic, and the long record of Armenian carpets being renamed
Two crosses, six centuries apart
On the right: a cross-stone from the monastery of Hovhannavank in Ohanavan, Aragatsotn. The main church of St. Karapet was built in 1216–1221, and the monastery’s monument record lists a winged khachkar and khachkars set into its walls. The History Museum of Armenia holds a 13th-century Hovhannavank cross-stone fragment: a cross with double-trefoiled arms, a large carved rosette below it, and interlace and cross-shaped quadrangles around it.
On the left: a late-19th-century Baluch rug, a type that museums catalogue as Bahlul-group weaving from northeast Persia.
Placed together, the two share a composition. Both are built on a stepped, cruciform silhouette. Both fill the interior with repeated crosses and rosette-like medallions inside geometric frames. Both close the field with a separate patterned border. The stone predates the rug by about six hundred years, and the stone’s grammar is the older one.
The grammar of the khachkar
The khachkar is a codified design language. A cross, often resting on a rosette or sun disc, with a stylised tree of life and arms ending in triple loops, sits within what the Smithsonian Folklife Festival calls a version of the Tree of Life, with sprouting and blooming motifs. A Yerevan State University study of 13th-century examples reads each stone as an ordered cosmos: stepped pedestal or rosette below, the cross as Tree of Life, a cornice above, and non-repeating interlace across the field. UNESCO inscribed khachkar art on the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2010.
The same organising ideas (centre, field, protective border) appear in Armenian carpets. A HSE University study argues that Armenian carpet composition expresses archaic cosmological ideas (a sacred centre, an ordered field, and a belt that guards it from chaos) that continued into Christian culture. The History Museum of Armenia’s collection shows the cross and the Tree of Life moving between media: an apron carrying a flower-adorned cross framed by equal-armed crosses and stars, and a carpet whose central motif is a tree of life with apple-bearing branches.
Armenian weaving is documented, and it is old
Dickran Kouyumjian’s survey records that Greek, Armenian and Arabic sources repeatedly describe fine rugs woven in Armenia, and that Marco Polo praised the rugs Armenians wove.
The Armenian word for a pile carpet, gorg, is first recorded in a 1242–43 inscription on the Kaptavan church in Artsakh. The 13th-century historian Kirakos Gandzaketsi, from the same region, praised the weaving skill of the princess Arzu-Khatun and her daughters.
Medieval Arab geographers wrote regularly about the Armenian carpets of Dvin and Qali-qala.
The Armenian Weekly cites the 1202 “Yerrakhoran” carpet with a dated Armenian inscription among the earliest securely dated Armenian pieces.
The earliest dated Armenian rug in Kouyumjian’s survey is the Kohar carpet, woven in Karabagh in 1700 with the weaver’s name and date, and Artsakh retained the dragon design into modern times, with a number of dragon rugs carrying Armenian inscriptions.
Hundreds of inscribed Armenian rugs have now been recorded and several major exhibitions organized around them.
The renaming of Armenian carpets
The scholarly record shows how Armenian weaving lost its name. A 2019 article on Dragon carpets begins from the observation that many regional rugs were originally attributed to Armenian weavers but, from the second quarter of the 20th century onwards, were reclassified as Turkish (Azeri) or Persian. The author traces the reclassification to a historiographical debate, including the 1925 essay “The myth of the Armenian dragon carpets”, a position later challenged, for example by Kouyumjian’s study of the Berlin Dragon-Phoenix carpet and its probable Armenian origin.
Kouyumjian himself describes the outcome: Armenian carpets have in this century been gradually subsumed under the heading of Islamic or Turkish carpets, and “until very recently, scholars have dismissed the possible Armenian origin” of the dragon carpets.
Collectors describe the same pattern in the market. Hratch Kozibeyokian, whose family wove carpets for four generations, told Hyperallergic that rugs produced by Armenians were often incorrectly presented as Turkish, Oriental, or simply Caucasian. The same report notes that Azerbaijani officials allege there is no such thing as Armenian carpets and that Armenians learned weaving from Azerbaijanis. Since 2010, Azerbaijani-style carpet making has been on UNESCO’s Representative List, and the Karabakh group is presented within it as Azerbaijani.
The Armenian Rugs Society has publicly protested what it calls a campaign to claim Armenian textiles, citing an article “Revival of Azerbaijani Carpet” that it says reproduces passages from its own 1980 publication Weavers, Merchants, and Kings with the words “Armenia” and “Armenian” replaced. Armenian Weekly’s guide to identification reports that at international auctions and museums, carpets with geometric patterns, dragon motifs and stylised crosses are frequently mislabelled “Anatolian,” “Caucasian” or “Azerbaijani”.
How an Armenian carpet is recognised
Because motifs travel, the strongest evidence for Armenian authorship is not a single shape. The 1985 Weavers, Merchants, and Kings exhibition reasoned that most motifs in these carpets are not exclusively Armenian, but occasional Christian crosses, Christian dates and, above all, inscriptions in Armenian establish origin. The Armenian Weekly’s guide adds the Armenian double knot, the red of Armenian cochineal (vordan karmir), and the presence of birds, horses, humans and crosses. A rug with a cross, a date or a weaver’s inscription in Armenian is Armenian on its own evidence.
What the pairing shows
The khachkar-and-rug pairing makes the central point visual: the cross-in-frame, stepped-contour, rosette-and-border composition is the khachkar’s own grammar, fixed in stone by the 13th century, and it reappears on a textile six centuries later. The Armenian stone tradition is dated, signed and inscribed. The rug’s attribution is the open question, and the long record of renamed Armenian weaving is the reason it deserves to be asked.
The practical conclusion for researchers, curators and dealers is the same one Kouyumjian reaches: attribute by evidence (inscriptions, dates, structure, dye, provenance), and stop defaulting to “Caucasian,” “Anatolian” or “Azerbaijani” when the evidence is Armenian.
Sources
Hovhannavank and the khachkar
Hovhannavank, Wikipedia
Hovhannavank, Hushardzan monument register
Cross-stone/Khachkar from Hovhannavank, History Museum of Armenia
Davtyan, “The Ornaments of the 13th Century Khachkars” (YSU)
Smithsonian Folklife Festival, “Khachkar”
Bradt Guides, “The meaning behind Armenia’s khachkars”
Armenian carpets
Kouyumjian, Armenian textiles survey (Fresno State)
Karabakh carpet, Wikipedia
Armenpress, Armenian carpet history
Armenian Weekly, “Artsakh Carpets as Historical Memory”
HSE Journal of Art & Design, composition of Armenian carpets
History Museum of Armenia, wool/carpet collection
Attribution and misattribution
Pollio, “Reconsidering dragon carpet origins” (2019)
Hyperallergic, “A War Over Patterns, Symbols, and the Cultural Heritage of Karabakh’s Carpets”
Armenian Weekly, “Five ways to identify Armenian carpets”
Christian Science Monitor, “A people’s culture: Rugs of Armenia” (1985)
ANCA, “Stealing Culture: Azeris Launch Campaign Claiming Armenian Carpets As Their Own”
Baluch rug reference
Colgate University, Bahlul-group rug
Image Source: Arto Tavukciyan
Artatsolum
The post Written in Wool, Carved in Stone: The Khachkar, the Carpet, and the Struggle to Name Armenian Weaving appeared first on Art-A-Tsolum.

https://allinnet.info/culture/written-in-wool-carved-in-stone-the-khachkar-the-carpet-and-the-struggle-to-name-armenian-weaving/