Armenian history: how the eastern corner of a homeland became the state

Where the name Armenia comes from

Armenians call themselves hay and their country Hayastan, and tradition traces both names to a legendary ancestor, Hayk. The name the rest of the world uses is an exonym. Its earliest certain appearance is in the Old Persian inscription of Darius the Great at Behistun, dated to about 520 BC by Britannica and to about 500 BC by the Wikipedia history, where the forms Armina and Armaniya name a land of the Persian empire. Older candidates exist, among them an Akkadian inscription of Naram-Sin and a people called Ermenen in a record of Thutmose III from 1446 BC, and none of them can be placed with certainty.

People lived in the highland long before either name. Stone tools about 325,000 years old have been found in Armenia, and a child's skull fragment and molar from Yerevan 1 Cave are dated to between 47,800 and 49,000 years before present. At the Areni-1 caves, surveys in 2010 and 2011 turned up a wine-making installation dated to 4000 BC and a leather shoe dated to 3500 BC.

Written history on the highland begins with Urartu, also called the Kingdom of Van, which lasted from the ninth century BC to about 585 BC and had its capital at Tushpa, the modern Van. Its king Argishti I built the fortress of Erebuni at the western edge of the Ararat plain with the labour of 6,600 prisoners of war. Wikipedia dates the foundation to 782 BC and Britannica to 783 BC, and the city that grew on the site is Yerevan. Urartu wrote its own language in Mesopotamian cuneiform. Britannica dates the Armenians' presence as successors to the Urartians to about 520 BC, and Armenian historiography counts the Urartians among the peoples from whom the Armenians formed. After the Medes took Van, the Orontid dynasty governed Armenia from 585 to 190 BC, first as Persian satraps and, once the Persian empire broke up in 330 BC, as kings in their own right.

How Armenia took its church and its alphabet

The Artaxiad kingdom, founded by Artaxias I in 190 BC, reached its widest extent under Tigranes the Great. Between 95 and 66 BC Greater Armenia ruled parts of the Caucasus and of what is now eastern and central Turkey, north-western Iran, Syria and Lebanon. It lost a war with Rome in 66 BC, and Tigranes ruled on as a Roman ally to his death in 55 BC. For the next four centuries the kingdom sat between Rome and Parthia, later Sassanid Persia. The compromise Corbulo reached in 63 put a Parthian prince of the Arsacid line, Tiridates I, on the Armenian throne, with each nomination subject to Rome's approval, and Trajan briefly made Armenia a Roman province between 114 and 118.

The Arsacid king Tiridates III was converted by Gregory the Illuminator, and Armenia made Christianity its state religion, in 301 in Wikipedia's dating and around 300 in Britannica's. Scholars have suggested the choice was made partly in defiance of the Sassanids. Gregory had been held in the pit at Khor Virap, which lies inside the present republic. The Mother Cathedral at Echmiatsin, inscribed by UNESCO in 2000 together with the ruins at Zvartnots, stands in the town earlier called Vagharshapat, a name UNESCO ties to King Vagharsh I, who reigned from 117 to 140.

Around 405 the monk Mesrop Mashtots, with the support of the king, created an alphabet of 36 letters, to which two more were added later. It was first used to translate the Bible, and the language of that translation, Grabar, became the standard for all later Armenian literature and stayed the formal written language into the nineteenth century. The kingdom it was made for was already divided. Rome and Persia had partitioned Armenia in the 380s, and in 428 Persia abolished the Arsacid monarchy in the east and installed a governor.

When the Persian king Yazdegerd II tried to reimpose Zoroastrianism, the Armenians rose under Vartan Mamikonian and were defeated at Avarayr in 451. Wikipedia gives 66,000 rebels, mostly peasants, against a Persian army of 180,000 to 220,000. The guerrilla war that followed ended with the Treaty of Nvarsak in 484, which guaranteed Armenians their religion. In the same years the Armenian Church rejected the Council of Chalcedon of 451, and it has stood apart from the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches since.

Why the later kingdoms formed further away

Arab armies conquered the country in 645 and made it the province of Arminiya. Armenians rose high in Byzantium in the same period: Heraclius, who reigned from 610 to 641, was of Armenian descent, and Basil I, who took the throne in 867, founded what is sometimes called the Armenian dynasty. The Bagratuni princes rebuilt a kingdom in the ninth century, recognised by Baghdad in 885 and by Constantinople in 886, and in 964 they built Ani as its capital. Byzantium took Ani in 1045 and the Seljuks took it in 1064. After the Byzantine defeat at Manzikert in 1071, the Turks held the rest of Greater Armenia.

The next kingdom grew on the far side of Asia Minor. Roupen, a relative of the murdered king of Ani, led a band of followers into the gorges of the Taurus Mountains in the late eleventh century, and his Rubenid descendants and the Hethumid family built a state on castles that commanded the mountain passes and the harbours of Cilicia. In 1199 Levon I was crowned king with crowns sent by both the German and the Byzantine emperors, and his successors were styled kings of the Armenians. The Mamluks of Egypt destroyed the kingdom in 1375.

Sources disagree about when Armenian statehood ended. Some date the end to the fall of Cilicia in 1375; others to the fall of the Bagratids in 1045, on the ground that Cilicia lay outside the traditional homeland and Ani was the last major independent state on the highland itself. Either way the gap closes in the twentieth century. In September 1917 a convention in Tiflis elected the Armenian National Council, which the Wikipedia history calls "the first sovereign political body of Armenians since the collapse of Lesser Armenia in 1375".

How Persia and Russia divided the Ararat plain

Shah Ismail I annexed Greater Armenia to Safavid Persia early in the sixteenth century, and the highland became the front between Persia and the Ottomans. Yerevan changed hands fourteen times between 1513 and 1737. The Peace of Amasya in 1555 left Western Armenia to the Ottomans, and the Treaty of Zuhab, which closed the war of 1623 to 1639, fixed the division: the west Ottoman, the east Persian.

In 1604 Shah Abbas I, withdrawing before an Ottoman army, ordered the towns and farms of the Ararat plain destroyed so the enemy could not live off them, and marched the whole population south with his army. About 300,000 people were driven to the banks of the Araxes, where the bridge had already been destroyed and a great many drowned in the crossing. Fewer than half of those deported survived the march to Isfahan. Abbas set up the Erivan Khanate on the emptied plain, a Muslim principality under Safavid rule, and after the deportation Armenians made up less than 20% of its people.

Russia moved south two centuries later. The Treaty of Gulistan in 1813 took Karabakh from Persia, and the Treaty of Turkmenchay in 1828 took the khanates of Erivan and Nakhichevan, which covered all of the present republic. Bournoutian describes the Khanate of Erevan in the first quarter of the nineteenth century as about 18,000 km² of mountainous, dry land with a population of about 100,000, roughly 80% Muslim and 20% Armenian. After 1828 an estimated 57,000 Armenian refugees returned from Persia and about 35,000 Muslims left.

Migration from Persia and the Ottoman Empire continued through the century. The Erivan Governorate regained an Armenian majority that it had lacked for several hundred years, and those districts would later, in the words of the Wikipedia account of the First Republic, "form the nucleus" of an independent Armenia. Armenians under the tsar lived in relative safety compared with those across the Ottoman border, although they were denied equal access to education and to the administration.

What the genocide took from Western Armenia

Britannica puts the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire at the start of the twentieth century at about 2.5 million, concentrated in six provinces of Eastern Anatolia; the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute in Yerevan gives about two million before the First World War. Armenians formed a majority in no single region, though many lived in wholly Armenian villages and town quarters. Hundreds of thousands were killed in the Hamidian massacres of 1894 to 1896, and some 20,000 more in Adana and Hadjin in 1909.

After the Ottoman defeat at Sarıkamış in January 1915, Armenian soldiers were disarmed, moved into labour battalions and killed. On 24 April 1915 the authorities in Constantinople arrested Armenian intellectuals and political leaders: about 250 in Britannica's account, 235 to 270 in the Wikipedia history, 800 in the museum's. In May the Ottoman parliament authorised deportation, and through the summer and autumn of 1915 the Armenians of Eastern Anatolia were marched toward camps in the Syrian desert while irregular forces, local Kurds and Circassians killed them on the way.

The number of dead depends on the source and the years it covers. Britannica's conservative estimate is 600,000 to more than 1,000,000 for 1915 and 1916. The Wikipedia history gives 1.5 million as the figure most often cited, within a range of 800,000 to 1,800,000, and the museum gives about 1.5 million for 1915 to 1923. By the end of the war more than 90% of the Ottoman Empire's Armenians were gone from Eastern Anatolia, and their homes were given to Muslim refugees.

The Turkish government rejects the characterisation of these events as genocide. It acknowledges that deportations took place and that there were atrocities, and it holds that the Armenians were a rebellious element pacified during a security crisis and that no policy of extermination existed. Britannica reports that most historians have concluded that the deportations and massacres fit the definition of genocide, and that several governments, among them Britain and Israel, have declined to use the word. Armenians commemorate the victims every year on 24 April.

About 50 Armenian dialects were known before 1915, some of them mutually unintelligible. Western Armenian, built on the speech of the Istanbul community, is now used mainly in Turkey, the Arab countries and the emigrant communities of Europe and the United States, and Eastern Armenian, built on the dialects of Yerevan and Tbilisi, is the language of the republic.

How the Erivan republic was built and lost

The Russian collapse of 1917 left the Transcaucasian provinces to form a federation of their own, which broke apart in the spring of 1918 amid war with the Ottoman Empire. Armenian forces halted that offensive in May 1918 at Sardarabad, Abaran and Karakilisa, and the republic was declared on 28 May 1918 with its capital at Yerevan. Ottoman Armenians and the diaspora often called it the Erivan Republic or the Ararat Republic, and some dismissed it as "only a dusty province without Ottoman Armenia whose salvation Armenians had been seeking for 40 years".

What the refugees and the border wars cost

The Treaty of Batum, signed on 4 June 1918, confined the republic to about 10,000 km² around Lake Sevan, with a further 1,000 km² conceded after the Armenian victories. Into that territory came the survivors of 1915. The historian Firuz Kazemzadeh counted at least 600,000 refugees in the summer of 1918, and by the time relief arrived some 150,000 to 180,000 of them, about 20% of the population, had died of famine and exposure. A report from February 1919 found that 40% of the inhabitants of the Sardarapat district had died.

With British support the republic took over Kars and Nakhchivan in the spring of 1919 and roughly tripled in size, then lost most of both when Muslim uprisings broke out from July 1919. It fought a border war with Georgia over Lori in December 1918 and fought Azerbaijan through 1919 and 1920 over Nakhchivan, Zangezur and Karabakh. It also established diplomatic relations with 40 countries and opened a university on 31 January 1920, with 8 professors and 200 students.

How Sèvres and Kars drew the final border

The Treaty of Sèvres, signed on 10 August 1920, recognised Armenia and assigned it 103,599 km² of the eastern Ottoman provinces, which would have brought the republic to about 155,000 km². The Ottoman sultan never signed it and it never came into force. A Turkish nationalist army invaded on 28 September 1920 and took Kars on 30 October. The Soviet 11th Red Army entered from Azerbaijan at Ijevan on 29 November, and power passed to a Soviet revolutionary committee in Yerevan on 2 December 1920. The Treaty of Alexandropol, which confined Armenia to the province of Yerevan, was signed the next day by a government that no longer held office.

In 1921 Soviet Russia and Turkey signed the Treaty of Kars. Turkey received the Kars territory, and with it the medieval capital at Ani and Mount Ararat. Britannica notes that the Aras cuts the Ararat plain in two, the northern half lying in Armenia and the southern half in Turkey and Iran.

What Soviet rule fixed in place

The Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic entered the Transcaucasian federation in 1922 and became a union republic of its own when that federation was dissolved in 1936. In 1923 the Soviet government made Nagorno-Karabakh an Armenian-majority autonomous region inside the Azerbaijan SSR, separated from Armenia by the Karabakh Range.

The Soviet decades changed who lived in the republic and where. Britannica records that from 1930 to 1990 considerable industrial development took place, and that by the late twentieth century two-thirds of the population, which was about nine-tenths Armenian, lived in towns. Repression under Stalin reached people who had survived 1915: the writer Zabel Yesayan, who returned from France, was exiled to Siberia.

On 24 April 1965 tens of thousands of people marched through Yerevan to mark fifty years since the genocide, which the Wikipedia history calls "the first public demonstration of such high numbers in the USSR". On 7 December 1988 an earthquake destroyed Spitak and badly damaged Leninakan, now Gyumri, killing about 25,000 people and destroying nearly a third of Armenia's industrial capacity, according to Britannica.

Why independence was fought over Karabakh

On 20 February 1988 the regional parliament of Nagorno-Karabakh voted to join Armenia, and the dispute that followed ran in parallel with the Soviet collapse. The Sumgait pogrom of 1988 and the Baku pogrom of 1990 were directed against Armenians; the Gugark pogrom of 1988 and the Khojaly massacre of 1992 were directed against Azerbaijanis. Armenia declared sovereignty on 23 August 1990, confirmed independence by referendum on 21 September 1991 and declared it on 23 September 1991. It joined the United Nations on 2 March 1992.

Full-scale war began early in 1992. By the Russian-brokered ceasefire of May 1994, Armenian forces held the enclave and surrounding districts, including the Lachin corridor to Armenia, and they went on holding about 9% of Azerbaijan's territory outside the enclave to 2020. About 724,000 Azerbaijanis were expelled from Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts, and between 300,000 and 500,000 Armenians were displaced from Azerbaijan and the border areas.

The war also cost the republic at home. Azerbaijan closed the gas pipeline and the rail link to Baku in 1989, Turkey closed its border, and the nuclear power station shut after the earthquake was reopened in 1995 in response to the energy shortage. By the mid-1990s about 750,000 people, roughly a fifth of the population, had emigrated. The Karabakh question also brought down governments. Levon Ter-Petrosyan, the republic's elected president, resigned in February 1998 after accepting a phased peace plan his own ministers rejected, and in 1999 gunmen killed the prime minister and several opposition leaders in the parliament chamber. Armenia and Turkey signed protocols on establishing diplomatic relations on 10 October 2009.

What the loss of Karabakh changed for Armenia

War resumed on 27 September 2020 and ended with a ceasefire on 9 and 10 November 2020, under which Armenia gave up military control of Nagorno-Karabakh and the districts around it and Russian peacekeepers took up posts for five years. The Lachin corridor was blockaded from December 2022. After an Azerbaijani offensive in September 2023, more than 100,000 of the roughly 120,000 Armenians of the region had fled by October 2023, most of them into Armenia, and the self-declared republic decreed its own dissolution.

Negotiations followed in 2024. In April 2024 the two states began to delimit their border, and Armenia agreed to hand over four abandoned Azerbaijani villages it had held since the first war. In March 2025 negotiators announced that the text of a peace treaty had been agreed. Azerbaijan made its signature conditional on Armenia removing what it regards as implicit territorial claims from its constitution, and the Armenian government proposed a constitutional referendum for 2027.

The constitution dates from 5 July 1995 and was amended in 2005 and again on 6 December 2015. Its preamble grounds itself in the Declaration on the Independence of Armenia and describes the state as the fulfilment of the ancestors' behest "for the restoration of the sovereign state". Its Article 19 commits the republic to work with the Armenian diaspora to preserve Armenian identity and to promote repatriation. Britannica, citing most estimates, puts the number of Armenians living abroad at 5,000,000 or more as of its 2026 revision, against a population of 2,930,450 in the republic in 2017.