The Powers of the Entente have undertaken the championship of small nationalities that cannot champion themselves. We have solemnly acknowledged our obligation to fulfil our vow in the case of Belgium and Serbia, and now that the Armenians have been overtaken by a still worse fate than the Serbians and the Belgians, their cause, too, has been taken up into the general cause of the Allies.
We cannot limit our field in doing battle for our ideal. It is easier, of course, for the people of France, Great Britain and America to sympathise with Belgium than with a more unfamiliar nation in a distant zone of the War.
It needs little imagination to realise acutely that the Belgians are "people like ourselves," suffering all that we should suffer if the same atrocities were committed upon us; and this realisation was made doubly easy by the speedy publication of minute, abundant, first-hand testimony. The Armenians have no such immediate access to our sympathies, and the initial unfamiliarity can only be overcome by a personal effort on the part of those who give ear to their case; but the evidence on which that case rests has been steadily accumulating, until now it is scarcely less complete or less authoritative than the evidence relating to Belgium.
The object of the present volume has been to present the documents to English and American readers in as accurate and orderly a form as possible. Armenia has not been without witness in her agony. Intense suffering means intense emotional experience, and this emotion has found relief in written records of the intolerable events which obsessed the witnesses' memories. Some of the writers are Armenians, a larger number are Americans and Europeans who were on the spot, and who were as poignantly affected as the victims themselves.
There are a hundred and forty-nine of these documents, and many of them are of considerable length; but in their total effect they are something more than an exhaustive catalogue of the horrors they set out to describe. The flames of war illuminate the structure of the building as well as the destruction of it, and the testimony extorted under this fiery ordeal gives an extraordinarily vivid impression of Armenian lifethe life of plain and mountain, town and village, intelligenzia and bourgeoisie and peasantryat the moment when it was overwhelmed by the European catastrophe.
In Armenia, though not in Europe, the flames have almost burnt themselves out, and, for the moment, we can see nothing beyond smoke and ashes. Life will assuredly spring up again when the ashes are cleared away, for attempts to exterminate nations by atrocity, though certain of producing almost infinite human suffering, have seldom succeeded in their ulterior aim.
But in whatever shape the new Armenia arises, it will be something utterly different from the old. The Armenians have been a very typical element in that group of humanity which Europeans call the "Near East," but which might equally well be called the "Near West" from the Indian or the Chinese point of view There has been something pathological about the history of this Near Eastern World.
It has had an undue share of political misfortunes, and had lain for centuries in a kind of spiritual paralysis between East and West-belonging to neither, partaking paradoxically of both, and wholly unable to rally itself decidedly to one or the other, when it was involved with Europe in the European War. The shock of that crowning catastrophe seems to have brought the spiritual neutrality of the Near East to a violent end, and however dubious the future of Europe may be, it is almost certain that it will be shared henceforth by all that lies between the walls of Vienna and the walls of Aleppo and Tabriz This final gravitation towards Europe may be a benefit to the Near East or another chapter in its misfortunesthat depends on the condition in which Europe emerges from the War; but, in either case, it will be a new departure in its history.
It has been drawn at last into a stronger orbit, and will travel on its own paralytic, paradoxical course no more. The Near East has never been more true to itself than in its lurid dissolution; past and present are fused together in the flare.
The documents in this volume tell their own story, and a reader might be ignorant of the places with which they deal and the points of history to which they refer, and yet learn from them more about human life in the Near East than from any study of text-books and atlases.
At the same time a general acquaintance with the geographical setting and historical antecedents is clearly an assistance in understanding the full significance of the events recorded here. As many as possible of the places referred to are marked on the map at the end of the book, while here, in this historical summary, a brief account may be given of who the Armenians are and where they live. Like the English, the French and most other nations, the Armenians have developed a specific type of countenance, and yet it would not always be easy to tell them by sight, for they are as hybrid in their physical stock as every other European or Near Eastern people.
There are marked differences of pigmentation, feature and build between the Armenians of the East, West and South, and between the mountaineers, plain-dwellers and people of the towns, and it would be rash to speculate when these various strains came in, or to lay it down that they were not all present already at the date at which we first begin to know something about the inhabitants of the country We hear of them first in the annals of Assyria, where the Armenian plateau appears as the land of Nairia no-man's-land, raided constantly but ineffectually by Assyrian armies from the lowlands of Mosul.
But in the ninth century B. The Kings of Urartu made their dwelling on the citadel of Van The face of the rock is covered with their inscriptions, which are also found as far afield as the neighbourhood of Malatia, Erzeroum and Alexandropol. They borrowed from Assyria the cuneiform script, and the earliest inscriptions at Van are written in the Assyrian language; but they quickly adapted the foreign script to their native tongue, which has been deciphered by English and German scholars, and is considered by them to be neither Semitic nor Indo-European, nor yet to have any discernible affinity with the still obscurer language of the Hittites further west.
We can only assume that the people who spoke it were indigenous in the land. Probably they were of one blood with their neighbours in the direction of the Caucasus and the Black Sea, Saspeires and Chalybes and others ; and if, as ethnology seems to show, an indigenous stock is practically ineradicable, these primitive peoples of the plateau are probably the chief ancestors, in the physical sense, of the present Armenian race The modern Armenian language, on the other hand, is not descended from the language of Urartu, but is an Indo-European tongue.
There is a large non-Indo-European element in itlarger than in most known branches of the Indo-European familyand this has modified its syntax as well as its vocabulary. It has also borrowed freely and intimately from the Persian language in all its phasesa natural consequence of the political supremacy which Iran asserted over Armenia again and again, from the sixth century B.
But when all these accretions have been analysed and discarded, the philologists pronounce the basis of modern Armenian to be a genuine Indo-European idiomeither a dialect of the Iranian branch or an independent variant, holding an intermediate, position between Iranian and Slavonic. This language is a much more important factor in the national consciousness of the modern Armenians than their ultimate physical ancestry, but its origin is also more difficult to trace.
Its Indo-European character proves that, at some date or other, it must have been introduced into the country from without , and the fact that a non-Indo-European language held the field under the Kings of Urartu suggests that it only established itself after the Kingdom of Urartu fell. But the earliest literary monuments of the modern tongue only date from the fifth century A.
One language, however, does not usually supplant another without considerable displacements of population, and the only historical event of this kind sufficient in scale to produce such a result seems to be the migration of the Cimmerians and Scythians in the seventh century B.
These were nomadic tribes from the Russian steppes, who made their way round the eastern end of the Caucasus, burst through into the Moghan plains and the basin of Lake Urmia, and terrorised Western Asia for several generations, till they were broken by the power of the Medes and absorbed in the native population.
It was they who made an end of the Kingdom of Urartu, and the language they brought with them was probably an Indo-European dialect answering to the basic element in modern Armenian. Probability thus points to these seventh century invaders as being the source of the present language, and perhaps also of the equally mysterious names of "Hai k " and "Haiasdan," by which the speakers of this language seem always to have called themselves and their country. But this is a conjecture, and nothing more , and we are left with the bare fact that Armenian was the established language of the land by the fifth century A.
The Armenian language might easily have perished and left less record of its existence than the Urartian. It is a vigorous language enough, yet it would never have survived in virtue of its mere vitality. The native Anatolian dialects of Lydia and Cilicia, and the speech of the Cappadocians , the Armenians' immediate neighbours on the west, were extinguished one by one by the irresistible advance of Greek, and Armenian would assuredly have shared their fate if it had not become the canonical language of a national church before Greek had time to penetrate so far eastward.
Armenia lay within the radius of Antioch and Edessa Ourfa , two of the earliest and strongest centres of Christian propaganda. King Tiridates Drdat of Armenia was converted to Christianity some time during the latter half of the third century A.
Christianity in Armenia adopted a national garb from the first. In A. These fifth century works are, as has been said, the earliest monuments of the Armenian language. Most of them, it is true, are simply rather painstaking translations of Greek and Syriac theology, and the bulk of the creative literature was theological too. But there was also a notable school of historical writers Moses of Khorene is its most famous representative , and the really important result of the stimulus that Christianity brought was the permanent preservation of the language's existence and its development into a medium for a national literature of a varied kind.
Thus the conversion of Armenia to Christianity, which took place at a more or less ascertainable date, was an even more important factor in the evolution of Armenian nationality than the original introduction of the national language, and the Armenians have done well to make St.
Gregory the Illuminator, the Cappadocian Missionary to whom the conversion was due, their supreme national hero Henceforth, church and language mutually sustained each other, to the great enhancement of the vital power of both. They were, in fact, merely complementary aspects of the same national consciousness, and the national character of the church was further emphasised when it diverged in doctrine from the main body of Christendomnot by the formulation of any new or heretical dogma, but by omission to ratify the modifications of the primitive creed which were introduced by the Ecumenical Councils of the fifth century A.
This nationalisation of the church was the decisive process by which the Armenians became a nation, and it was also this that made them an integral part of the Near Eastern world. Christianity linked the country with the West as intimately as the cuneiform script of Urartu had linked it with the civilisation of Mesopotamia ; and the Near Eastern phenomenon consists essentially in the paradox that a series of populations on the borderland of Europe and Asia developed a national life that was thoroughly European in its religion and culture, without ever succeeding in extricating themselves politically from that continual round of despotism and anarchy which seems to be the political dispensation of genuinely Oriental countries.
No communities in the world have had a more troubled political history than these Near Eastern nationalities, and none have known how to preserve their church and their language so doggedly through the most appalling vicissitudes of conquest and oppression. In this regard the history of Armenia is profoundly characteristic of the Near East as a whole. The strong, compact Kingdom of Urartu lies at the dawn of Armenian history like a golden age. It had only existed two centuries when it was shattered by the invaders from the Russian steppes, and the anarchy into which they plunged the country had to be cured by the imposition of a foreign rule.
In B. One of these seems to have included the basins of Urmia and Van, and part of the valley of the Aras ; the other corresponded approximately to the modern Vilayets of Bitlis, Mamouret-ul-Aziz and Diyarbekir, and covered the upper valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates They were called respectively the satrapies of Eastern and Western Armenia, and this is the origin of the name by which the Haik and their Haiasdan are now almost universally known to their neighbours.
The word "Armenia" Armina first appears in Darius' inscriptions ; the Greeks adopted it from the Persian official usage, and from the Greeks it has spread to the rest of the world, including the Osmanli Turks Subject to the payment of tribute the satraps were practically independent and probably hereditary, but the rulers' autonomy did not enable their subjects to develop any distinctive national life.
In religion and culture the country took on a strong Persian veneer ; and the situation was not essentially changed when, early in the second century B. The decisive change was accomplished by Tigranes Dikran the Great 94 to 56 B. If Gregory the Illuminator is the ecclesiastical hero of Armenia, King Tigranes is his political forerunner and counterpart. He was connected by marriage with Mithradates, the still more famous King of Pontic Cappadocia, who may be taken as the first exponent of the Near Eastern idea.
Mithradates attempted to build an empire that should be at once cosmopolitan and national, Hellenic and Iranian, of the West and of the East, and Tigranes was profoundly influenced by his brilliant neighbour and ally.
He set himself the parallel ambition of reconstructing round his own person the kingdom of the Seleucids, which had been shaken a century before by a rude encounter with Rome, weakened still further by the defection of Tigranes' own predecessors, and was now in the actual throes of dissolution. He laid himself out a new capital on the northern rim of the Mesopotamian steppe, somewhere near the site of Ibrahim Pasha's Viran Shehr, and peopled it with masses of exiles deported from the Greek cities he devastated in Syria and Cilicia.
It was to be the Hellenistic world-centre for an Oriental King of Kings ; but all his dreams, like Mithradates', were shattered by the methodical progress of the Roman power. A Roman army ignominiously turned Tigranes out of Tigranokerta, and sent back his Greek exiles rejoicing to their homes. The new Armenian kingdom failed to establish its position as a great power, and had to accept the position of a buffer state between Rome on the west and the Parthian rulers of Iran.
Nevertheless, Tigranes' work is of supreme political importance in Armenian history. He had consolidated the two satrapies of Darius into a united kingdom, powerful enough to preserve its unity and independence for nearly five hundred years. It was within this chrysalis that the interaction of religion and language produced the new germ of modern Armenian nationality; and when the chrysalis was rent at last, the nation emerged so strongly grown that it could brave the buffets of the outer world.
Before Tigranes, Armenia had belonged wholly to the East. Tigranes loosened these links and knit certain new links with the West. The period that followed was marked by a perpetual struggle between the Roman and Parthian Governments for political influence over the kingdom, which was really a battle over Armenia's soul. Was Armenia to be wrested away altogether from Oriental influences and rallied to the European world, or was it to sink back into being a spiritual and political appanage of Iran?
It seemed a clear issue, but it was not destined to be decided in either sense. Armenia was to be caught for two millenniums in the uncertain eddy of the Nearer East. In this opposition of forces, the political balance inclined from the first in favour of the Oriental Power. The Parthians succeeded in replacing the descendants of Tigranes by a junior branch of their own Arsacid Dynasty; and when, in A.
In the cultural sphere, on the other hand, the West was constantly increasing its ascendancy. King Tiridates was an Arsacid, but he accepted Christianity as the religion of the State he ruled ; and when, less than a century after his death, his kingdom fell and the greater part of the country and the people came directly under Persian rule, the Persian propaganda failed to make any impression.
No amount of preaching or persecution could persuade the Armenians to accept Zoroastrianism, which was the established religion of the Sassanian State. They clung to their national church in despite of their political annihilation, and showed thereby that their spiritual allegiance was given irrevocably to the West.
The partition of A. In the second quarter of the seventh century A. Persian governors appointed by the Sassanid King of Kings were superseded by Arab governors appointed by the Omayyad and Abbasid Caliphs, and the intolerance of Zoroastrianism was replaced by the far stronger and hardly less intolerant force of Islam.
Then, in the ninth century, the political power of the Abbasid Caliphate at Baghdad began to decline, the outlying provinces were able to detach themselves, and three independent dynasties emerged on Armenian soil:.
Their capital was at Ani, in the upper basin of the Aras, and their rule in this district lasted nearly two centuries, from to A. They reigned here from to A. Their capital was at Diyarbekir, but their power extended northward over the mountains into the valley of the Mourad Su Eastern Euphrates , which they controlled as far upwards as Melazkerd.
They maintained themselves for a century, from to A. The imposing remains of churches and palaces at Ani and elsewhere have cast an undue glamour over the Bagratid House, which has been extended, again, to all the independent principalities of early medieval Armenia.
In reality, this phase of Armenian history was hardly more happy than that which preceded it, and only appeared a Golden Age by comparison with the cataclysms that followed. From the national point of view it was almost as barren as the century of satrapial independence which preceded the reign of Tigranes, and in the politics of this period parochialism was never transcended.
Bagratids and Ardzrounids were bitter rivals for the leadership of the nation, and did not scruple to call in Moslem allies against one another in their constant wars. The south-western part of the country remained under the rule of an alien Moslem dynasty, without any attempt being made to cast them out.
Armenia had no second Tigranes in the Middle Ages, and the local renewals of political independence came and went without profit to the nation as a whole, which still depended for its unity upon the ecclesiastical tradition of the national Gregorian Church. In the eleventh century A. The Arab Empire of the Caliphs had long been receiving an influx of Turks from Central Asia as slaves and professional soldiers, and the Turkish bodyguard had assumed control of politics at Baghdad.
But this individual infiltration was now succeeded by the migration of whole tribes, and the tribes were organised into a political power by the clan of Seljuk.
The new Turkish dynasty constituted itself the temporal representative of the Abbasid Caliphate, and the dominion of Mohammedan Asia was suddenly transferred from the devitalised Arabs to a vigorous barbaric horde of nomadic Turks. These Turkish reinforcements brutalised and at the same time stimulated the Islamic world, and the result was a new impetus of conquest towards the borderlands.
The brunt of this movement fell upon the unprepared and disunited Armenian principalities. In the first quarter of the eleventh century the Seljuks began their incursions on to the Armenian Plateau.
The Armenian princes turned for protection to the East Roman Empire, accepted its suzerainty, or even surrendered their territory directly into its hands. But the Imperial Government brought little comfort to the Armenian people. Centred at Constantinople and cut off from the Latin West, it had lost its Roman universality and become transformed into a Greek national state, while the established Orthodox Church had developed the specifically Near Eastern character of a nationalist ecclesiastical organisation.
The Armenians found that incorporation in the Empire exposed them to temporal and spiritual Hellenisation, without protecting them against the common enemy on the east. The Seljuk invasions increased in intensity, and culminated, in A. Melazkerd placed the whole of Armenia at the Seljuk's mercyand not only Armenia, but the Anatolian provinces of the Empire that lay between Armenia and Europe. The Seljuks carried Islam into the heart of the Near East. The next four-and-a-half centuries were the most disastrous period in the whole political history of Armenia.
It is true that a vestige of independence was preserved, for Roupen the Bagratid conducted a portion of his people south-westward into the mountains of Cilicia, where they were out of the main current of Turkish invasion, and founded a new principality which survived nearly three hundred years There is a certain romance about this Kingdom of Lesser Armenia.
It threw in its lot with the Crusaders, and gave the Armenian nation its first direct contact with modern Western Europe. But the mass of the race remained in Armenia proper, and during these centuries the Armenian tableland suffered almost ceaseless devastation.
The Seljuk migration was only the first wave in a prolonged outbreak of Central Asiatic disturbance, and the Seljuks were civilised in comparison with the tribes that followed on their heels. Early in the thirteenth century came Karluks and Kharizmians, fleeing across Western Asia before the advance of the Mongols ; and in came the first great raid of the Mongols themselvessavages who destroyed civilisation wherever they found it, and were impartial enemies of Christendom and Islam.
All these waves of invasion took the same channel. They swept across the broad plateau of Persia, poured up the valleys of the Aras and the Tigris, burst in their full force upon the Armenian highlands and broke over them into Anatolia beyond.
Armenia bore the brunt of them all, and the country was ravaged and the population reduced quite out of proportion to the sufferings of the neighbouring regions. The division of the Mongol conquests among the family of Djengis Khan established a Mongol dynasty in Western Asia which seated itself in Azerbaijan, accepted Islam and took over the tradition of the Seljuks, the Abbasids and the Sassanids.
It was the old Asiatic Empire under a new name, but it had now incorporated Armenia and extended north-westwards to the Kizil Irmak Halys. For the first time since Tigranes, the whole of Armenia was reabsorbed again in the East, and the situation grew still worse when the Empire of these "Ilkhans" fell to pieces and was succeeded in the fifteenth century by the petty lordship of Ak Koyunli, Kara Koyanli and other nomadic Turkish clans. The progressive anarchy of four centuries was finally stilled by the rise of the Osmanli power.
The seed of the Osmanlis was one of those Turkish clans which fled across Western Asia before the Mongols. They settled in the dominions of the Seljuk Sultans, who had established themselves at Konia, in Central Anatolia, and who allowed the refugees to carve out an obscure appanage on the marches of the Greek Empire, in the Asiatic hinterland of Constantinople.
The son and successor of the founder was here converted from Paganism to Islam , towards the end of the thirteenth century A. In its present decline it has become nothing but a blight to all the countries and peoples that remain under its sway ; but at the outset it manifested a faculty for strong government which satisfied the supreme need of the distracted Near Eastern world.
This was the secret of its amazing power of assimilation, and this quality in turn increased its power of organisation, for it enabled the Osmanlis to monopolise all the vestiges of political genius that survived in the Near East.
The original Turkish germ was quickly absorbed in the mass of Osmanlicised native Greeks The first expansion of the State was westward, across the Dardanelles, and before the close of the fourteenth century the whole of South-Eastern Europe had become Osmanli territory, as far as the Danube and the Hungarian frontier.
Mohammed himself absorbed the rival Turkish principalities in Anatolia, and annexed the Greek "Empire" of Trebizond. Learn about ancient civilizations and experience the thrill of exploring natural formations. The symbol of pre-Christian Armenia — Garni is a pagan temple that sits on a cliff overlooking a ravine surroun The church was commissioned by the same Bishop Hovhannes.
It was designed by the architect, sculptor and min Armenia: The Cradle of Civilization. The Ancient Armenia Armenia is a country with ancient history and rich culture. The Historical Armenia The current Republic of Armenia makes up only a small part of what the historical lands used to hold. Ancient Inhabitants, the Armenian Highlands The rocky mountains, stones, and caves of Armenia are covered with petroglyphs. Karahunj Observatory Known as the "Armenian Stonehenge," Zorats Karer, or Karahunj is a famous megalithic structure consists of hundreds of vertically arranged two-meter stones or menhirs that are stretched from the south to the north.
Caves of the Ancient World With more than 10, caves in the country, there's a cave for every history enthusiast or adventure seeker in Armenia. Holy Mother of God Subscribe to our Newsletter. The spiritual independence of Armenia was further asserted in , when the second Council of Dvin capital of Armenia of that period rejected the dyophysite formula of the Council of Chalcedon , a decisive step that cut Armenians off from the Roman and Greek churches as surely as they were already ideologically severed from the East.
By the time of Arab invasion in Armenia, ruled by prince Theodore Rshtuni, was virtually independent. After conquering Persia, the Arabs started to concentrate their armies against Armenia, but didn't manage to conquer the country until Bagratunian dynasty, Third Armenian Kingdom After more than two centuries of struggle with the Arab Caliphate, Armenia regained its independence in , and both the Caliphate and Constantinople recognized prince Ashot Bagratuni as the king of Armenia.
During the rule of the Bagratuni dynasty Armenia reached its peak in political, social and cultural development. The capital of Armenia of that period, Ani, was a magnificent city, known as "a city of one thousand and one churches".
The Armenian architecture of the Bagratuni period, especially the dome laying techniques, for which Armenian architects were notorious, significantly influenced the Byzantine and European architectural styles.
At the end of the 10th century the Byzantine Empire, although ruled by an imperial dynasty of Armenian origin, adopted a near-sighted policy of weakening Armenia and eventually annexed it in , thus depriving itself of an effective shield against disastrous invasion of Turkic nomads from Central Asia. Rubinian dynasty, Fourth Armenian Kingdom Before the fall of the Bagratuni kingdom a number of Armenian princes managed to escape from Armenia and found refuge in Cilicia, a region at the north-eastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea, where Armenians were the majority of population.
The new Armenian state established very close relations with European countries and played a very important role during the Crusades, providing the Christian armies a safe heaven and provision on their way towards Jerusalem.
Intermarriage with European crusading families was common, and European religious, political, and cultural influence was strong. The royal court of Cilicia and the kingdom itself were reformed on Western models, and many French terms entered the Armenian language.
Cilician Armenia also played an important role in the trade of the Venetians and Genoese with the East. Enduring constant attacks by the Turks, Mongols, Egyptians and Byzantines, Cilician Armenia survived for three centuries and fell to Egyptian Mameluks in Denis Cathedral of Paris. The title "King of Armenia" passed to the kings of Cyprus, thence to the Venetians, and was later claimed by the house of Savoy. Armenia under turkish rule After the fall of the Cilician Armenia, the historical Armenian homeland, or Greater Armenia, was subject to various Muslim warlords, and eventually was divided between the Ottoman Empire Western Armenia and Persia Eastern Armenia.
Several Armenian principalities managed to preserve their independence or autonomy. The most significant among those was the Federation of Khamsa in Artsakh today's Nagorno-Karabakh , which consisted of five allied principalities. De facto independent Armenian principalities existed also in the regions of Sasun and Zeytun in Western Armenia.
Being for centuries at the edge of physical annihilation, Armenians nevertheless managed to preserve and develop their national, religious and cultural identity. Apart from architecture, Armenians successfully manifested themselves in literature, painting, sculpture and music.
Armenians were the 10th nation in the world to put their language in print. Contact with liberal thought in Russia and Western Europe was a factor in the Armenian cultural renaissance of the 19th century. In the Ottoman Empire, the Armenians initially benefited with the rest of the population from the measures of reform known as the Tanzimat, and in a special Armenian constitution was recognized by the Ottoman government.
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