Armenian highlands

Armenian highlands
Հայկական լեռնաշխարհ
The Armenian highlands near the Iran–Turkey border with Mount Ararat in the distance
Highest point
PeakMount Ararat, Turkey
Elevation5,137 m (16,854 ft)
Coordinates39°42′07″N 44°17′54″E / 39.7019°N 44.2983°E / 39.7019; 44.2983[1]
Dimensions
Area616,417 km2 (238,000 sq mi)[2]
Geography
Satellite image
Countries
RegionWest Asia
Range coordinates39°17′01″N 43°22′19″E / 39.28361°N 43.37194°E / 39.28361; 43.37194

The Armenian highlands (Armenian: Հայկական լեռնաշխարհ, romanized: Haykakan leṙnašxarh; also known as the Eastern Anatolian highlands, Armenian upland, Armenian plateau, or Armenian tableland)[3] comprise the most central and the highest of the three plateaus that together form the northern sector of West Asia.[3] Clockwise starting from the west, the Armenian highlands are bounded by the Anatolian plateau, the Caucasus, the Kura-Aras lowlands, the Iranian Plateau, and Mesopotamia.[4] The highlands are divided into western and eastern regions, defined by the Ararat Valley where Mount Ararat is located. Western Armenia is nowadays referred to as Eastern Anatolia.[5][6][7][8] On the other hand, Eastern Armenia is part of Lesser Caucasus or Caucasus Minor, which was historically known by some as the Anti-Caucasus,[9][10] meaning "opposite of the Caucasus".

During the Iron Age, the region was known by variations of the name Ararat (Urartu, Uruatri, Urashtu). Later, the Highlands were known as Armenia Major, a central region to the history of Armenians,[11] and one of the four geopolitical regions associated with Armenians,[11] the other three being Armenia Minor, Sophene, and Commagene.[12][13] The highlands are primarily defined by the geographical dispersal of its native inhabitants, the Armenians.[14] Prior to the appearance of nominally Armenian people in historical records, historians have hypothesized that the region must have been home to various ethnic groups who became homogenous when the Armenian language came to prominence.[15] The population of the Armenian highlands has had a high level of regional genetic continuity for over 6,000 years.[11][16] Recent studies indicate that the Armenian people descend from the indigenous people of the Armenian highlands and form a distinct genetic isolate in the region.[11][17] The region was also inhabited during Antiquity by minorities such as Assyrians, Georgians, Greeks, Jews, and Iranians. During the Middle Ages, Arabs and particularly Turkmens and Kurds settled in large numbers in the Armenian highlands.

The region was administered for most of its known history by Armenian nobility and states, whether it was as part of a fully independent Armenian state, as vassals, or as part of a foreign state. Since the 1040s, the highlands have been under the rule of various Turkic peoples and the Safavid dynasty, with pockets of Armenian autonomy in places such as Artsakh. Much of Eastern Armenia, which had been ruled by the Safavids from the 16th century, became part of the Russian Empire in 1828 and was later incorporated into the Soviet Union, while much of Western Armenia was ruled by the Ottoman Empire and later incorporated into modern Turkey. Today, the region is divided between Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran, and Turkey.[14][18]

The Armenians of Western Armenia were exterminated during the Armenian genocide (1915–1917), orchestrated by the Committee of Union and Progress as part of their Turkification policies.[19][20] Today, Eastern Armenia is mainly inhabited by Armenians, Azerbaijanis, and Georgians, while Western Armenia is mainly inhabited by Turks, Kurds, Azerbaijanis, Assyrians, and a small population of Armenians (including crypto-Armenians and Hemshins).

  1. ^ "Topographic map of Ağrı Dağı". opentopomap.org. Retrieved 2023-06-15.
  2. ^ Hewsen, R. H. (1997). "The Geography of Armenia". The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times. Vol. 1. New York: St. Martin's Press. p. 5. ISBN 978-0-312-10169-5. ...it can be said that historical Armenia is more or less the region located between latitudes 38 and 48 degrees and longitudes 37 and 41 degrees, with a total area of approximately 238,000 square miles
  3. ^ a b Hewsen, Robert H. "The Geography of Armenia" in The Armenian People From Ancient to Modern Times Volume I: The Dynastic Periods: From Antiquity to the Fourteenth Century. Richard G. Hovannisian (ed.) New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997, pp. 1–17
  4. ^ Krikorian, Robert; Masih, Joseph (2013). Armenia: At the Crossroads. Postcommunist States and Nations. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. pp. xix. ISBN 978-90-5702-344-6. This area includes the territory of the present Republic of Armenia, much of eastern Turkey, the northwestern corner of Iran, as well as territories in the republics of Georgia and Azerbaijan. Towering over both the South Caucasian plain in the north and the lowlands of Mesopotamia in the south, it is linked with Asia Minor to the west and Iran to the east, primarily through the valleys of the upper Euphrates and Arax rivers. It is bounded in the north by the Pontic chain and in the south by the Taurus and the mountains of Kurdistan south of Lake Van.
  5. ^ Cheterian, Vicken (2015). Open Wounds: Armenians, Turks and a Century of Genocide. Oxford and New York City: Oxford University Press. p. 65. ISBN 978-1-84904-458-5. As a result of policies such as these, the expression Armenian Plateau, which had been used for centuries to denote the mountainous highlands around Lake Van and Lake Sevan, was eliminated and replaced by the expression 'eastern Anatolia'.
  6. ^ Galichian, Rouben (2004). Historic Maps of Armenia: The Cartographic Heritage. London and New York City: I.B. Tauris. pp. 8–9. ISBN 978-1-86064-979-0.
  7. ^ Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies. Vol. 14–16. Los Angeles. 2005. p. 55. Most of historical Armenia presently constitutes a part of Turkey (renamed "Eastern Anatolia"), which conducts a policy of minimizing the role of the Armenians in history{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  8. ^ Cite error: The named reference :0 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  9. ^ Bealby, John Thomas; Kropotkin, Peter Alexeivitch (1911). "Caucasus" . In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 05 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 550–555. ...1. Western Caucasus...&...2. Middle Caucasus: (a) Western Half...&...3. Middle Caucasus: (b) Eastern Part...&...4. The Eastern Section
  10. ^ Reclus, Onésime (1892). A Bird's-eye View of the World. Ticknor. p. 264. anti caucasus.
  11. ^ a b c d "Armenian Rarities Collection". www.loc.gov. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress. 2020. Archived from the original on 7 March 2023. Retrieved 27 March 2023. The lands of the Armenians were for millennia located in Eastern Anatolia, on the Armenian Highlands, and into the Caucasus Mountain range. First mentioned almost contemporaneously by a Greek and Persian source in the 6th century BC, modern DNA studies have shown that the people themselves had already been in place for many millennia. Those people the world know as Armenians call themselves Hay and their country Hayots' ashkharh–the land of the Armenians, today known as Hayastan. Their language, Hayeren (Armenian) constitutes a separate and unique branch of the Indo-European linguistic family tree. A spoken language until Christianity became the state religion in 314 AD, a unique alphabet was created for it in 407, both for the propagation of the new faith and to avoid assimilation into the Persian literary world.
  12. ^ Adalian, Rouben Paul (2010). Historical dictionary of Armenia (2nd ed.). Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. pp. 336–8. ISBN 978-0-8108-7450-3.
  13. ^ Grierson, Otto Mørkholm; Westermark, Ulla (1991). Philip (ed.). Early Hellenistic coinage: from the accession of Alexander to the Peace of Apamea (336-188 B.C.) (Repr. ed.). Cambridge, the U.K.: Cambridge University Press. p. 175. ISBN 0-5213-9504-6.
  14. ^ a b Sinclair, Thomas A. (2014). "Armenia (topography)". In Fleet, Kate; Krämer, Gudrun; Matringe, Denis; Nawas, John; Rowson, Everett (eds.). Encyclopaedia of Islam (3rd ed.). Brill Online. ISSN 1873-9830.
  15. ^ La Porta, Sergio (2018). "Armenia". In Nicholson, Oliver (ed.). The Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-866277-8. Among the diversity of ethnicities residing on the Armenian plateau in Antiquity, the Armenian-speakers came to prominence during the Achaemenid period.
  16. ^ Hovhannisyan, Anahit; Jones, Eppie; Delser, Pierpaolo Maisano; Schraiber, Joshua; Hakobyan, Anna; Margaryan, Ashot; Hrechdakian, Peter; Sahakyan, Hovhannes; Saag, Lehti; Khachatryan, Zaruhi; Yepiskoposyan, Levon (2020-06-24). "AN ADMIXTURE SIGNAL IN ARMENIANS AROUND THE END OF THE BRONZE AGE REVEALS WIDESPREAD POPULATION MOVEMENT ACROSS THE MIDDLE EAST". bioRxiv: 2020.06.24.168781. doi:10.1101/2020.06.24.168781. S2CID 220253091. Archived from the original on 2020-08-15. We show that Armenians have indeed remained unadmixed through the Neolithic and at least until the first part of the Bronze Age, and fail to find any support for historical suggestions by Herodotus of an input from the Balkans. However, we do detect a genetic input of Sardinian-like ancestry during or just after the Middle-Late Bronze Age. A similar input at approximately the same time was detected in East Africa, suggesting large-scale movement both North and South of the Middle East. Whether such large-scale population movement was a result of climatic or cultural changes is unclear, as well as the true source of gene flow remains an open question that needs to be addressed in future ancient DNA studies. [...] We focused on solving a long-standing puzzle regarding Armenians' genetic roots. Although the Balkan hypothesis has long been considered the most plausible narrative on the origin of Armenians, our results strongly reject it, showing that modern Armenians are genetically distinct from both the ancient and present-day populations from the Balkans. On the contrary, we confirmed the pattern of genetic affinity between the modern and ancient inhabitants of the Armenian Highland since the Chalcolithic, which was initially identified in previous studies. [...] Sardinians have the highest affinity to early European farmers [...]{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: article number as page number (link)
  17. ^ Haber, Marc; Mezzavilla, Massimo; Xue, Yali; Comas, David; Gasparini, Paolo; Zalloua, Pierre; Tyler-Smith, Chris (21 October 2015). "Genetic evidence for an origin of the Armenians from Bronze Age mixing of multiple populations". European Journal of Human Genetics. 24 (6): 931–936. doi:10.1038/ejhg.2015.206. PMC 4820045. PMID 26486470. Our tests suggest that Armenians had no significant mixture with other populations in their recent history and have thus been genetically isolated since the end of the Bronze Age, 3000 years ago.
  18. ^ "Armenian Highland | Historic Region | Britannica". www.britannica.com.
  19. ^ Üngör, Uğur Ümit (June 2008). "Seeing like a nation-state: Young Turk social engineering in Eastern Turkey, 1913–50". Journal of Genocide Research. 10 (1). London and New York: Routledge: 15–39. doi:10.1080/14623520701850278. ISSN 1469-9494. OCLC 260038904. S2CID 71551858.
  20. ^ Roshwald, Aviel (2013). "Part II. The Emergence of Nationalism: Politics and Power – Nationalism in the Middle East, 1876–1945". In Breuilly, John (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 220–241. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199209194.013.0011. ISBN 978-0-19-175030-4.
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