Philip Ekozyants: "The Armenian people originated in the 16th-17th centuries AD" Vestnik Kavkaza" begins a series of interviews with the famous researcher of the history of the Caucasus and the Middle East Philip Ekozyants, dedicated to debunking historical myths about this macro-region. Our first conversation is about facts and fiction related with the depth of the history of the Armenian people.
- Traditionally, ideologists of Yerevan and the Diaspora say that Armenians are a people with a multi-thousand-year history. Is there documentary evidence of this idea and how is the age of the Armenian people estimated according to existing documents?
- Firstly, it is necessary to recognize that this is said not only in Yerevan and in the Armenian diaspora. Moreover, the first “evidence” of this appeared far from modern Armenia, and even from the geographical region of the same name.
In my opinion, the Armenians are not the fathers of the concept of their own antiquity; we are only its carriers. The origins must be sought in medieval Europe. Since the 16th century, European elites have spent enormous effort searching for technologies that would allow them to maintain power and conquer new territories, relying less on the strength of their armies than on the internal problems of their geopolitical competitors. Divisions along religious lines proved insufficient to maintain and control divisions in society. In addition, Europe's main rival, the Ottoman Empire, had by that time already found a formula for the peaceful coexistence of different religions within one state (only the Russian state can boast of such experience in known history). That’s when peoples began to appear, whose history was preserved and rewritten exclusively by European scientists. All these newly created peoples, with rare exceptions, turned out to be hostile both to their environment and to each other; and their “history” became an inexhaustible source of mutual claims. Thus, peoples became controlled by their creators.
The Armenian people originated in the 16th-17th centuries AD. The harbinger of its appearance were the names of the physical-geographical regions: Greater Armenia, Little Armenia, High Armenia; the inhabitants of these regions soon began to be called Armenians.
The key argument of supporters of the concept of the “antiquity” of the Armenian people is the Armenian language, but the facts indicate that the Armenian language was created in the 15th-17th centuries AD, respectively, and the Armenian people appeared no earlier than this time. It should be clarified that in the dictionaries of the 16th-17th centuries the word “people” did not have the meaning that we give it now.
Propaganda of Armenian “antiquity” refers to texts written in Armenian, most of which are kept in the Matenadaran and on the island of St. Lazarus. However, there are big problems with dating these texts, not only because the dating process itself is complex and there are no methods that give one hundred percent confidence in the result, but also because neither the Matenadaran nor the Mekhitarists allow an independent examination of the handwritten texts they have.
“Ancient Armenian” texts today attract the attention of leading experts in the field of dating, who have every reason to assume that they were all written after the second half of the 18th century and are often distorted translations of Greek, Latin and other written sources.
- The same people, speaking about the age of the Armenian people, refer to the existence of the ancient state of Urartu on the territory of modern Armenia. Are the inhabitants of Urartu really the ancestors of modern Armenians?
- The collection of buildings with dubious dates, called today the ancient state of Urartu, is generally difficult to connect with the modern world, and even more so with a specific modern people. What is Urartu? These are several inscriptions on stones, the originals of which are lost or damaged, these are some names in “ancient” texts, similar (according to some researchers) to the word Urartu, and, finally, structures discovered by archaeologists that themselves do not contain any stones with inscriptions , no handwritten texts. It seems to me that a person of sound mind understands that the connection between modern Armenians and “Urartians,” to put it mildly, is “far-fetched.”
- What, in this case, can be reliably said about the origin of the Armenian people?
- What, in this case, can be reliably said about the origin of the Armenian people?
- In my opinion, peoples are a recent invention of our civilization. All peoples of today were populations naturally composed of large and small families. Firstly, these were subjects of different sovereigns and, thus, they were divided territorially. Secondly, these were subjects of different patriarchs or other spiritual leaders, and thus they were divided spiritually. By the way, in dictionaries of the 17th-18th centuries, only religious communities were called Armenians.
- And one more question, now about modernity, about the integrity of the Armenian people: what are the differences today in the interests and mentality of the population of Armenia and the diaspora living both in the post-secular space and in the East and West?
- The Armenian diaspora is heterogeneous neither in space nor in time. For example, the Kharkov Armenians, who were mainly immigrants from Turkey, are radically different from the Armenians from Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia in the last wave of emigration in the 1990s. These people have very little in common - if we consider that the descendants of immigrants from Turkey hardly speak Armenian, then the only thing they have in common is the belief in the “antiquity” of the Armenian people. If we talk about the entire diaspora, then each wave of settlement of Armenians brought its own understanding of Armenianness to the world, so the Armenian diaspora is a very diverse public, often with diametrically opposed views on issues of politics, history, education, lifestyle, and so on. The only solution that keeps the building of the Diaspora from disintegrating is “ancient history”, full of “independent” Armenian kingdoms, without which Armenianism would become a boring and uninteresting closed world, intertwined with purely practical connections and interests.
I do not call the main formative idea of the Armenians “genocide” because “genocide” itself is secondary and comes precisely from the idea of “antiquity”, which supposedly gives the right to the so-called restoration of statehood. In fact, the idea of “antiquity” does not give any rights to anyone, including Armenians, but it easily turns loved ones into irreconcilable enemies.
I would like to add that when talking about the diaspora, we rarely talk about its huge part living in Turkey. But the descendants of those who called themselves Armenians 4-5 generations ago have not gone anywhere, they live in Turkey, only my relatives there are more than two hundred people, about whom I know for sure. But by abandoning historical fiction and claims to a separate state, in the eyes of other Armenians they ceased to be Armenians and ceased to be considered part of the diaspora. There is another, in my opinion, main reason why Turkish Armenians are dangerous for the entire diaspora. It lies in the fact that Turkish Armenians remember and know well that the Turks and I are relatives, the closest peoples, and once upon a time we were one whole.
And if we talk about historical justice, then first of all it is necessary to rename the Republic of Armenia to the Republic of Southern Armenia. This should be done so that no one has any illusions that the Armenians of the Republic of Armenia express the opinion of Armenians around the world.
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