Armenians

Armenians, people of Indo-European origin who live mainly in the republic of Armenia, but are also dispersed throughout the world. The earliest Armenians seem to have lived on the Balkan Peninsula and settled in Asia Minor in the 13th century bc. In the 7th century bc they established the kingdom of Urartu, to the east of present-day Anatolia. It was during this period that the Armenian language, one of the defining features of the Armenian people, was formed; it developed from a combination of the language spoken by these conquerors with that of local peoples and of neighbouring Assyro-Babylonian groups; it also contains certain Greek and Persian elements. Armenians traditionally lived by farming and herding.

Having settled in the south-western Caucasus, at the point of confrontation between the great Slavic, Persian, Arab, and Turkish empires, and on the path of invaders, the Armenians were forced to fight and deal with powers bent on expanding their boundaries. From the time that they settled there, the Armenians were fighting for the survival of their nation. For this reason they formed alliances with such major neighbouring powers as the Romans, the Parthians, the Persians, the Arabs, the Franks, and the Turks; at the same time, however, they were quick to repulse any attempt on the part of their allies to annex their territory. This historical region of Armenia is first mentioned by name in an inscription dating from 521 bc, recording the fact that Darius I had annexed the region. Thereafter the name “Armenia” appears regularly in the annals of war between the great local powers and accounts of Armenian resistance, when Armenian sovereigns are mentioned in connection with their efforts to reclaim Armenian territory.

The Armenian nation assumed the characteristics that it has today in ad 302, when it was converted to Christianity by St Gregory the Illuminator. A hundred years later the Armenian alphabet (Grabar) was developed by the monk Mesrob Machtotz. The Armenian language, together with the Armenian alphabet and the Christian religion, was instrumental in defining the nationhood of the people, distinguishing it from its powerful neighbours and preserving its identity through times of servitude. From the 5th century onward, many histories and religious treatises were written. (The Bible was first transcribed in Armenian.) The flowering of Armenian literature had its counterpart in a distinctive style of architecture characterized by a dome of Persian origin in Byzantine church architecture, notably at Hagia Sophia, in Constantinople (now İstanbul).

The massacres that took place at the end of the 19th century and the genocide in Turkey in the early 20th century caused the dispersal of surviving Armenians throughout the world and the establishment of an Armenian republic in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) (now an independent republic). The Armenian language and the Armenian Church remain as the unifying force linking the diaspora of over 1.5 million people (many of whom live in the United States and France) as well as nearly 5 million Armenians in Armenia and the former USSR. Although there are Catholics and Protestants among Armenians, most belong to the Armenian Church.