Different peoples throughout different times used to refer to Armenia by different names. The Sumerians in around 2,800 BCE called Armenia – Aratta, while the Akkadians that succeeded them in the second half of Third Millennium BCE called Armenia – Armani or Armanum. The Hittites who rose in the Second Millennium BCE called Armenia – Hayasa, while the Assyrians who arose in the second half of Second Millennium BCE called Armenia – Uruatri or Urartu (Ararat of the Bible).
With their disappearance from the historical arena, the different names that they used to refer to Armenia and the Armenian people disappeared with them. However, Armenia and the Armenian people, always found the strength for renewal throughout the long millennia of their epic history and continued to fight on for both preservation and progress.
Aratta is considered the first recorded Armenian state.It is mentioned in the oldest Sumerian texts that we have found about the Epic of Gilgamesh. Although it is mentioned in the earliest inscriptions, about 4.800 years ago that does not mean Aratta did not exist before that. Quentin Atkinson and Russell Gray have proved that Armenian language already split from the Mother Tongue in the Indo-European Homeland in Armenian Highland some 8,500 years ago. When ancient Armenians built Portasar about 12,000 years ago there was already some kind of level of sophisticated organization which was surely required to accomplish such a massive undertaken for its time period.
The website that accompanies “Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family” (August 24 Science), maintained by co-author Quentin D. Atkinson, proudly features several maps that allow the easy visualization of the patterns generated by the model. One is a conventional map that purports to show “language expansion in time and space,” depicting and dating the spread of Indo-European languages through a red-to-blue color scheme. The other cartographic product is a sequence of numerous map-frames that ostensibly shows Indo-European (I-E) expansion from the seventh millennium BCE to 1974 CE. This Google-Earth-based animated map, or “movie,” as Atkinson calls it, is explained in terms that are at once simplistic and cryptic.
Regardless of whether the authors are intentionally trying to mislead the public or have simply succeeded in fooling themselves, their work approaches scientific malpractice. Science ultimately demands empirical verification, and here the project fails miserably.
Quentin Atkinson’s Nonsensical Maps of Indo-European Expansion
Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family
Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family
Language family may have Anatolian origins
Family Tree of Languages Has Roots in Anatolia, Biologists Say
Articles in Indo-European Origins
The separation of Proto-Anatolian from Proto-Indo-European was followed by the separation of the Greek-Armenian-Aryan dialect grouping, which subsequently divided into Greek, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian. The widespread migrations of the tribes making up this dialect community evidently began after its breakup and the creation of Greek, Proto-Armenian, and Indo-Iranian as individual Indo-European dialects. This breakup evidently began when the dialect grouping was still part of Proto-Indo-European, with the formation of a separate Aryan dialect area while Greek-Armenian dialect unity was still preserved.
Graeco-Aryan (or Graeco-Armeno-Aryan) is a hypothetical clade within the Indo-European family, ancestral to the Greek language, the Armenian language, and the Indo-Iranian languages. Graeco-Aryan unity would have become divided into Proto-Greek and Proto-Indo-Iranian by the mid 3rd millennium BC. The Phrygian language would also be included.
Conceivably, Proto-Armenian would have been located between Proto-Greek and Proto-Indo-Iranian, consistent with the fact that Armenian shares certain features only with Indo-Iranian (the satem change) but others only with Greek (s > h).
Graeco-Armeno-Aryan has comparatively wide support among Indo-Europeanists for the Indo-European Homeland to be located in the Armenian Highland. Early and strong evidence was given by Euler’s 1979 examination on shared features in Greek and Sanskrit nominal flection.
Used in tandem with the Graeco-Armeno-Aryan hypothesis, the Armenian language would also be included under the label Aryano-Greco-Armenic, splitting into proto-Greek/Phrygian and “Armeno-Aryan” (ancestor of Armenian and Indo-Iranian).
In the context of the Kurgan hypothesis, Greco-Aryan is also known as “Late PIE” or “Late Indo-European” (LIE), suggesting that Greco-Aryan forms a dialect group which corresponds to the latest stage of linguistic unity in the Indo-European homeland in the early part of the 3rd millennium BC.
By 2500 BC, Proto-Greek and Proto-Indo-Iranian had separated, moving westward and eastward from the Pontic Steppe, respectively.
A Near Eastern homeland for Proto-Indo-European requires relatively little movement of Proto-Armenian, which remained in Asia Minor where it could have come into contact with the Anatolian linguistic world. From there the Proto-Armenians spread to historical Armenia and overlaid a Hurrian-Urartean substratum (see Diakonoff). Contacts of Proto-Armenian with Hittite and Luwian are confirmed by a number of Armenian borrowings from the Anatolian languages.
When the Armenians were first attested the Anatolian languages were already extinct that’s why the fact that Armenian has Hittite loanwords is very important. In their book “Indo-Europeans and Indo-European languages” Gamkrelidze & Ivanonv propose an eastern Anatolian origin for “proto Greco-Armeno-Indo-Iranian” based upon Semitic and Kartvelian loanwords peculiar to Greek-Armenia-Aryan.
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