The Armenian Highlands, also known as the Armenian Upland, Armenian plateau, Armenian tableland or simply Armenia, is the most central and the highest of the three plateaus that together form the northern sector of Western Asia.
To its west is the Anatolian plateau, which rises slowly from the lowland coast of the Aegean Sea and converges with the Armenian Highlands to the east of Cappadocia. To its southeast is the Iranian plateau. The Caucasus extends to the northeast of the Armenian Highlands. To the southwest of the Armenian Highlands is Upper Mesopotamia.
The Armenian hypothesis of the Proto-Indo-European homeland suggests that Proto-Indo-European was spoken during the 5th–4th millennia BC in “eastern Anatolia, the southern Caucasus, and northern Mesopotamia”. Recent DNA-research has led to renewed suggestions of a Caucasian homeland for a ‘pre-proto-Indo-European’.
The Armenian plateau hypothesis gains in plausibility since the Yamnaya partly descended from a Near Eastern population, which resembles present-day Armenians. The Yamnaya culture is identified with the late Proto-Indo-Europeans, and is the strongest candidate for the urheimat of the Proto-Indo-European language.
During the Iron Age, the region was known by variations of the name Ararat (Urartu), a geographical region commonly used as the exonym for the Iron Age kingdom also known by the modern rendition of its endonym, the Kingdom of Van, centered around Lake Van in the historic Armenian Highlands (present-day eastern Anatolia).
The written language that the kingdom’s political elite used is referred to as Urartian, which appears in cuneiform inscriptions. The geopolitical region would re-emerge as Armenia shortly after. Being heirs to the Urartian realm, the earliest identifiable ancestors of the Armenians are the peoples of Urartu. The present-day Armenians are an amalgam of the Indo-European groups with the Hurrians and Urartians.
It is unknown what language was spoken by the peoples of Urartu at the time of the existence of the kingdom, but there is linguistic evidence of contact between the proto-Armenian language and the Urartian language at an early date (sometime between the 3rd—2nd millennium BC), occurring prior to the formation of Urartu as a kingdom.
During Antiquity, the area was known as “Armenia Major,” a central region to the history of Armenians, and one of the four geo-political regions associated with Armenians, the other three being Armenia Minor, Sophene, and Commagene.
The Turkic peoples, o the other side, are a collection of ethno-linguistic groups of Central, Eastern, Northern and Western Asia as well as parts of Europe and North Africa. The Turkic peoples speak related languages belonging to the Turkic language family. They share, to varying degrees, certain cultural traits, common ancestry and historical backgrounds.
The homeland of the Turkic peoples and their language is suggested to be somewhere between the Transcaspian steppe and Northeastern Asia (Manchuria), with genetic evidence pointing to the region near South Siberia and Mongolia as the “Inner Asian Homeland” of the Turkic ethnicity.
According to several linguists the Turkic languages originated in a region of East Asia spanning Western China to Mongolia, where Proto-Turkic is thought to have been spoken, according to one estimate, around 2,500 years ago, from where they expanded to Central Asia and farther west during the first millennium.
Turkic languages show some similarities with the Mongolic, Tungusic, Koreanic and Japonic languages. These similarities led some linguists to propose an Altaic language family, though this proposal is widely rejected by historical linguists. Apparent similarities with the Uralic languages even caused these families to be regarded as one for a long time under the Ural-Altaic hypothesis.
However, there has not been sufficient evidence to conclude the existence of either of these macrofamilies, the shared characteristics between the languages being attributed presently to extensive prehistoric language contact.
However, extensive contact took place between Proto-Turks and Proto-Mongols approximately during the first millennium BC; the shared cultural tradition between the two Eurasian nomadic groups is called the “Turco-Mongol” tradition. The two groups shared a similar religion-system, Tengrism, and there exists a multitude of evident loanwords between Turkic languages and Mongolic languages.
In the Turkic mythology the Ergenekon legend tells about a great crisis of the ancient Turks. The myth aims to explain the foundation of the Turkic Khaganate (Old Turkic: 𐰃𐰓𐰃𐰆𐰴𐰽𐰔:𐰰𐰇𐰚:𐱅𐰇𐰼𐰰; lit. ‘United Celestial Turks’) or Göktürk Khaganate, a khaganate established by the Ashina clan of the Göktürks in medieval Inner Asia.
Following a military defeat, the Turks took refuge in the legendary Ergenekon valley where they were trapped for four centuries. They were finally released when a blacksmith created a passage by melting mountain, allowing the gray wolf Asena to lead them out.
The people led out of the valley found the Turkic Khaganate, in which the valley functions as its capital. The capital referred to is assumed to be Ordu-Baliq (meaning “city of the court”, “city of the army”), also known as Mubalik and Karabalghasun.
Its ruins, 27 km north-to-northwest of the later Mongol capital, Karakorum, are known as Kharbalgas in Mongolian meaning “black city”. They form part of the World Heritage Site Orkhon Valley Cultural Landscape.
Under the leadership of Bumin Qaghan (d. 552) and his sons, the Ashina succeeded the Rouran Khaganate as the hegemonic power of the Mongolian Plateau and rapidly expanded their territories in Central Asia.
Initially the Khaganate would use Sogdian in official and numismatic functions. It was the first Turkic state to use the name Türk politically. Old Turkic script was invented at the first half of the 6th century.
The Sogdian language was an North-Eastern Iranian language spoken in the Central Asian region of Sogdia, located in modern-day Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. It was one of the most important Middle Iranian languages, along with Bactrian, Khotanese Saka, Middle Persian, and Parthian.
Asena is the name of a she-wolf associated with the Oghuz Turkic foundation myth. The legend of Asena tells of a young boy who survived a battle; a female wolf finds the injured child and nurses him back to health.
The she-wolf, impregnated by the boy, escapes her enemies by crossing the Western Sea to a cave near the Qocho mountains and a city of the Tocharians, giving birth to ten half-wolf, half-human boys. Of these, Ashina becomes their leader and establishes the Ashina clan, which ruled over the Göktürk and other Turkic nomadic empires.
Tocharian, also spelled Tokharian is an extinct branch of the Indo-European language family. It is known from manuscripts dating from the 5th to the 8th century AD, which were found in oasis cities on the northern edge of the Tarim Basin (now part of Xinjiang in northwest China) and the Lop Desert.
The origin of the Ashina is from the Iranian Saka or possibly from the Indo-Aryan Wusun. We are dealing with a royal family and clan of Saka origin”. The term bori, used to identify the ruler’s retinue as ‘wolves’, probably also derived from one of the Iranian languages.
The name “Ashina” comes from one of the Saka languages of central Asia and means “blue” (gök in Turkic). The color is identified with the east, so that Göktürk, another name for the Turkic empire, meant the “Turks of the East”. It is an association between the name and the compound “kindred of Ashin” ahşaẽna – Old Persian, which can get quite satisfactory etymological development.
This is so even in East Turkestan; then the desired form would be in the Sogdian ‘xs’ yn’ k (-әhšēnē) “blue, dark”; Khotan-Saka (Brahmi) āşşeiņa (-āşşena) “blue”, where a long -ā- emerged as development ahş-> āşş-; in Tocharian A āśna- “blue, dark” (from Khotan-Saka and Sogdian).
The Saka etymology ashina (<āşşeiņa ~ āşşena) with the value “blue” (the color of the sky) is phonetically and semantically flawless. There is a textual support for this version in the ancient runic inscriptions of the Turks.
In the large Orkhon inscriptions, in the story of the first Kagan, people living in the newly created empire are named “kök türk” (translated as “Celestial Turks”). Without touching the numerous interpretations “kök” may have in this combination, note its perfect semantic match with the reconstructed value of the name “Ashina”.
An explicit semantic calque suggests knowledge of its original meaning and foreign origin, which is compatible with the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural nature of the First Turkic khanate, which entailed the loss, however, of the popularity of “national character”, in the words of L. Bazin, as was the political and cultural environment of the Otyuken regime of the era of Bilgä Qaǧan.
The name “Ashina” is translated by some researchers as “wolf”. When Ashina became the head of Göktürks, they exhibited a banner with a wolf head over their gate, in reminiscence of its origins. The origin myth of Ashina share similarities with the Wusun, although there is a significant difference that, whereas in the Wusun myth the wolf saves the ancestor of the tribe, it is not as in the case of the Turks.
The Wusun are generally believed to have been an Indo-Aryan-speaking people. They are thought to be Iranian or Tocharian speaking. The Tocharians were an Indo-European people who inhabited the medieval oasis city-states on the northern edge of the Tarim Basin (modern Xinjiang, China) in ancient times.
The Battle of Manzikert was fought between the Byzantine Empire and the Seljuk Empire on 26 August 1071 near Manzikert, theme of Iberia (modern Malazgirt in Muş Province, Turkey). In one of the most decisive defeats in Byzantine history, the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan defeated and captured Emperor Romanus Diogenes.
The Turkish victory led to the ethnic and religious transformation of Armenia and Anatolia, the establishment of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, and later the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey. The Seljuks pillaged Manzikert itself, killed much of its population, and burned the city to the ground.
The lands around Manzikert belonged to the Manavazyans, an Armenian nakharar family which claimed descent from Manaz, until 333 A.D., when King Khosrov III Arshakuni of Armenia ordered that all members of the family be put to the sword. He later awarded the lands to another family, the Aghbianosyans.
The settlement dates to the Iron Age: according to Tadevos Hakobyan it was established during the reign of the Urartian king Menua (r. 810–785 BC). The Armenian name Manazkert is supposedly shortened from Manavazkert adopted in Greek. The suffix -kert is frequently found in Armenian toponymy, meaning “built by”.
According to Movses Khorenatsi, Manzikert was founded by Manaz, one of the sons of Hayk, the legendary and eponymous patriarch and progenitor of the Armenians. After the demise of Urartu it passed into the hands of successive regional kingdoms and empires.
The decisive defeat of the Byzantine army and the capture of the Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes played an important role in undermining Byzantine authority in Anatolia and Armenia, and allowed for the gradual Turkification of Anatolia. Many of the Turks, who had been travelling westward during the 11th century, saw the victory at Manzikert as an entrance to Asia Minor.
The western portion of historical Armenia, known as Western Armenia, had come under Ottoman jurisdiction by the Peace of Amasya (1555) and was permanently divided from Eastern Armenia by the Treaty of Zuhab (1639). Thereafter, the region was alternatively referred to as “Turkish” or “Ottoman” Armenia.
The Armenian Genocide (also known as the Armenian Holocaust) was the systematic mass murder and expulsion of 1.5 million ethnic Armenians within the Ottoman Empire (most of whom were citizens) by the Ottoman government from approximately 1914 to 1923.
The genocide was carried out during and after World War I and implemented in two phases—the wholesale killing of the able-bodied male population through massacre and subjection of army conscripts to forced labour, followed by the deportation of women, children, the elderly, and the infirm on death marches leading to the Syrian Desert.
Driven forward by military escorts, the deportees were deprived of food and water and subjected to periodic robbery, rape, and massacre. Most Armenian diaspora communities around the world came into being as a direct result of the genocide.
The premeditated destruction of objects of Armenian cultural, religious, historical and communal heritage was yet another key purpose of both the genocide itself and the post-genocidal campaign of denial. Armenian churches and monasteries were destroyed or changed into mosques, Armenian cemeteries flattened, and, in several cities (e.g., Van), Armenian quarters were demolished.
Other ethnic groups were similarly targeted for extermination in the Assyrian genocide and the Greek genocide, and their treatment is considered by some historians to be part of the same genocidal policy.
After the establishment of the movement and the successful Turkish War of Independence, the revolutionaries abolished the Ottoman sultanate on November 1, 1922, and proclaimed the Republic of Turkey on October 29, 1923.
The movement terminated the Treaty of Sèvres and negotiated the Treaty of Lausanne, assuring recognition of the national borders, termed Misak-ı Millî (National Pact). The Turkish National Movement under Kâzım Karabekir invaded and defeated Armenia, also recapturing territory which the Ottoman Empire had lost to the Russian Empire in 1855 and 1878.
With the rise of Turkish ethnic nationalism in the 1930s, the veneration of figures of Turkic Mythology, such as Asena and Ergenekon was resurgent. The symbol of Asena is embossed on the stage of the personal theater of the first President of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, at his residence in Ankara; the Atatürk referenced the motif in speech, such as that of 13 February 1931,Türk Ocağı, in Malatya.’
Raphael Lemkin was moved specifically by the annihilation of the Armenians to define systematic and premeditated exterminations within legal parameters and to coin the word genocide in 1943. The Armenian Genocide is acknowledged to have been one of the first modern genocides, because scholars point to the organized manner in which the killings were carried out. It is the second-most-studied case of genocide after the Holocaust.
Turkey denies that the word genocide is an accurate term for these crimes, but in recent years has been faced with increasing calls to recognize them as such. As of 2019, governments and parliaments of 32 countries, including the United States, Russia, and Germany have recognized the events as a genocide.
Wusun – Ashina Tribe – Asena