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Ancient Man and His First Civilizations

Anatolia-3

Modern Turkey

Armenia

The term Armenian may be the result of Persian or Greek confusion of them with the Aramaeans. Though most think the Ancient Armenians (not the current people), to have been from the Indus Valley, there is the possibility that they may in fact have been ethnically Amorite's (Aramaeans). Another very real possibility is that they were Colchians.

Colchis

Colchis is an ancient region at the eastern end of the Black Sea, south of the Caucasus mountains in the western part of modern Georgia. It consisted of the valley of the Phasis (modern Riuni) River. In Greek mythology Colchis was the home of Medea and the destination of the Argonauts, a land of fabulous wealth and the domain of sorcery. Colchis was later colonized by Milesian Greeks to whom the native Colchians supplied gold, slaves, hides, linen cloth, agricultural produce, and such shipbuilding materials as timber, flax, pitch, and wax.

The ethnic composition of the Colchians, as described by Herodotus, was Egyptian. Remnants of the army of Senusret I, (Greek Sesostris), who was the second king of the 12th Dynasty and had ascended to the throne after the murder of his father Amenemhet I. After the 6th century B.C, they lived under the nominal suzerainty of Persia and passed into the kingdom of Mithradates VI, (1st century B.C.), and then under the rule of Rome. United with Lazica in the 4th century A.D, Colchis constituted an important buffer state between the Sassanian Persian and Byzantine empires. In the late 8th century Colchis was attached to Abasgia, which in turn was incorporated into Russian Georgia.

Herodotus on Colchis

Passing over these monarchs, therefore, I shall speak of the king who reigned next, whose name was Sesostris. He, the priests said, first of all proceeded in a fleet of ships of war from the Arabian gulf along the shores of the Erythraean sea, subduing the nations as he went, until he finally reached a sea which could not be navigated by reason of the shoals. Hence he returned to Egypt, where, they told me, he collected a vast armament, and made a progress by land across the continent, conquering every people which fell in his way.

In the countries where the natives withstood his attack, and fought gallantly for their liberties, he erected pillars, on which he inscribed his own name and country, and how that he had here reduced the inhabitants to subjection by the might of his arms: where, on the contrary, they submitted readily and without a struggle, he inscribed on the pillars, in addition to these particulars, an emblem to mark that they were a nation of women, that is, unwarlike and effeminate.

[2.103] In this way he traversed the whole continent of Asia, whence he passed on into Europe, and made himself master of Scythia and of Thrace, beyond which countries I do not think that his army extended its march. For thus far the pillars which he erected are still visible, but in the remoter regions they are no longer found. Returning to Egypt from Thrace, he came, on his way, to the banks of the river Phasis. Here I cannot say with any certainty what took place. Either he of his own accord detached a body of troops from his main army and left them to colonise the country, or else a certain number of his soldiers, wearied with their long wanderings, deserted, and established themselves on the banks of this stream.

[2.104] There can be no doubt that the Colchians are an Egyptian race. Before I heard any mention of the fact from others, I had remarked it myself. After the thought had struck me, I made inquiries on the subject both in Colchis and in Egypt, and I found that the Colchians had a more distinct recollection of the Egyptians, than the Egyptians had of them. Still the Egyptians said that they believed the Colchians to be descended from the army of Sesostris. My own conjectures were founded, first, on the fact that they are black-skinned and have woolly hair, which certainly amounts to but little, since several other nations are so too; but further and more especially, on the circumstance that the Colchians, the Egyptians, and the Ethiopians (Nubians), are the only nations who have practised circumcision from the earliest times.

The Phoenicians and the Syrians of Palestine themselves confess that they learnt the custom of the Egyptians; and the Syrians who dwell about the rivers Thermodon and Parthenius, as well as their neighbours the Macronians, say that they have recently adopted it from the Colchians. Now these are the only nations who use circumcision, and it is plain that they all imitate herein the Egyptians. With respect to the Ethiopians, indeed, I cannot decide whether they learnt the practice of the Egyptians, or the Egyptians of them - it is undoubtedly of very ancient date in Ethiopia - but that the others derived their knowledge of it from Egypt is clear to me from the fact that the Phoenicians, when they come to have commerce with the Greeks, cease to follow the Egyptians in this custom, and allow their children to remain uncircumcised.

[2.105] I will add a further proof to the identity of the Egyptians and the Colchians. These two nations weave their linen in exactly the same way, and this is a way entirely unknown to the rest of the world; they also in their whole mode of life and in their language resemble one another. The Colchian linen is called by the Greeks Sardinian, while that which comes from Egypt is known as Egyptian.

For the sake of conformity however, let us accept ancient Armenians as being from the Indus Valley. At its height, Armenia extended from the south-central Black Sea coast to the Caspian Sea and from the Mediterranean Sea to Lake Urmia in present-day Iran. The original Armenians, probably a Dravidian people fleeing the Arian invaders in Pakistan, first appear in history shortly after the end of the 7th century B.C. Driving out some of the ancient population to the east of Mount Ararat, (Namely Urartians), the invaders imposed their leadership over regions which, although suffering much from Scythian and Cimmerian attacks, must still have retained elements of a high degree of civilization, (e.g., walled cities, irrigation works, and arable fields).

The Hayk, as the Armenians name themselves, were not able to achieve the power and independence of their predecessors (Hatti, Urartians), and were first rapidly incorporated by Cyaxares into the Median empire and then annexed with Media by Cyrus II to form part of the Achaemenian Empire of Persia (550 B.C.). The country is mentioned as Armina and Armaniya in the Bisitun inscription of Darius I (522 B.C.), and according to Herodotus, formed part of the 13th satrapy (province) of Persia, the Alarodioi forming part of the 18th. Xenophon's Anabasis, recounting the adventures of Greek mercenaries in Persia, describes the local government at about 400 B.C, as being in the hands of village headmen, part of whose tribute to the Persian king consisted of horses. Armenia continued to be governed by Persian or native satraps until its absorption into the Macedonian empire of Alexander the Great (331 B.C.) and its successor, the Seleucid empire (301 B.C.).

The following pictures are of Persian relief's at Persepolis.

See: Additional Material Menu - for more on Persepolis, Apadana, and pictures of the people of the Persian Empire.

The Artaxiads

After the defeat of the Seleucid king Antiochus, by Rome at the Battle of Magnesia in 189 B.C, his two Armenian satraps, Artashes and Zareh, established themselves with Roman consent, as kings of Greater Armenia and Sophene respectively, thus becoming the creators of an independent Armenia. Artashes built his capital Artashat, on the Aras River near modern Yerevan. The Greek geographer Strabo names the capital of Sophene as Carcathiocerta. An attempt to end the division of Armenia into an eastern and western part was made about 165 B.C. when the Artaxiad ruler sought to suppress his rival, but it was left to his descendant Tigranes II (95 B.C.) to establish, by his conquest of Sophene, a unity that was to last almost 500 years.

Under Tigranes, Armenia ascended to a pinnacle of power unique in its history and became, albeit briefly, the strongest state in the Roman east. Extensive territories were taken from the kingdom of Parthia in Iran, which was compelled to sign a treaty of alliance. Iberia (Georgia), Albania, and Atropatene had already accepted Tigranes' suzerainty when the Aramaeans, tired of anarchy, offered him their crown (83 B.C.). Tigranes penetrated as far south as Canaan.

Armenian culture at the time of Tigranes was Persian, as it had been and as it was fundamentally to remain for many centuries. The Armenian empire lasted until Tigranes became involved in a struggle between his father-in-law, Mithradates VI of Pontus, and Rome. The Roman general Lucius captured Tigranocerta, Tigranes' new capital in 69 B.C, but He failed to reach Artashat. In 66 B.C, the legions of Pompey, aided by one of Tigranes' sons, succeeded in reaching Artashat. Tigrane was compelled to give-up Syria and other conquests in the south, and to become an ally of Rome. Armenia thus became a buffer state, and often a battlefield between Rome and Parthia. Maneuvering between larger neighbors, the Armenians gained a reputation for deviousness; the Roman historian Tacitus called them an ambigua gens (“ambiguous people”).

The Eurasian Invasion - Arrival of the Turks

Armenia did not begin to take on it's modern identity until the 11th. century A.D. By the time of the invasions of the Turkish Seljuq peoples in the 11th century A.D, the Armenian kingdoms had already been destroyed from the west. The province of Taron had been annexed to the Byzantine Empire in 968 A.D, and the expansionist policy of the Byzantine emperor Basil II finally extinguished Armenian independence. The possessions of David of Tayq were annexed in 1000 A.D, and the kingdom of Vaspurakan in 1022 A.D. In the latter year, the Bagratid king of Ani, Yovhannes-Smbat, was compelled to make the Roman emperor heir to his estates, and in 1045 A.D, despite the resistance of Gagik II, Ani was seized by the Roman Constantine IX.

The Byzantine conquest was however short-lived: in 1048 A.D, The Turks arrived, Toghrïl Beg led the first Seljuq Turk raid into Armenia in 1064 A.D. Ani and Kars fell to Toghrïl's nephew and heir Alp-Arslan, and after the Battle of Manzikert (1071 A.D.), most of the country was in Turkish hands. In 1072 A.D, the Kurdish Shaddadids received Ani as a fiefdom. A few native Armenian rulers survived for a time in the Kiurikian kingdom of Lori, the Siuniqian kingdom of Baghq or Kapan, and the principates of Khachen (Artzakh) and Sasun. In the 12th century many former Armenian regions became parts of Georgia, and between 1236 and 1242 A.D, the whole of Armenia and Georgia fell into the hands of the Mongols. Soon the Turkic Ottoman Empire will raise, below is a short history of the Turks.

Turks

Turks are Eurasians who may be any of various peoples whose members speak languages belonging to the Turkic subfamily of the Altaic family of languages. They are historically and linguistically connected with the T'u-chüeh, the name given by the Chinese to the nomadic people who in the 6th century A.D. founded an empire stretching from Mongolia and the northern frontier of China to the Black Sea. With some exceptions, notably in the European part of Turkey and in the Volga region, the Turkic peoples are confined to Asia. Their most important cultural link, aside from history and language, is that with Islam, for with the exception of the Sakha (Yakut) of eastern Siberia and the Chuvash of the Volga region of Russia, they are all Muslim.

The Turkic peoples may be divided into two main groups: the western and the eastern. The western group includes the Turkic peoples of southeastern Europe and those of southwestern Asia inhabiting Anatolia (Turkey) and northwestern Iran. The eastern group comprises the Turkic peoples of Central Asia, Kazakhstan, and the Uighur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang in China. Turkic peoples display a great variety of ethnic types.

Little is known about the origins of the Turkic peoples, and much of their history even up to the time of the Mongol conquests in the 10th–13th A.D. is shrouded in obscurity. Chinese documents of the 6th century A.D. refer to the empire of the T'u-chüeh as consisting of two parts, the northern and western Turks. This empire submitted to the nominal suzerainty of the Chinese T'ang dynasty in the 7th century, but the northern Turks regained their independence in 682 and retained it until 744 A.D. The Orhon inscriptions, the oldest known Turkic records (8th century A.D.), refer to this empire and particularly to the confederation of Turkic tribes known as the Oguz; to the Uighur, who lived along the Selenga River (in present-day Mongolia); and to the Kyrgyz, who lived along the Yenisey River (in north-central Russia).

When able to escape the domination of the T'ang dynasty, these northern Turkic groups fought each other for control of Mongolia from the 8th to the 11th century, when the Oguz migrated westward into Persia and Afghanistan. In Persia the family of Oguz tribes known as Seljuqs created an empire that by the late 11th century stretched from the Amu Darya south to the Persian Gulf and from the Indus River west to the Mediterranean Sea.

The Khazars were another ancient Turkic people who first appeared in Transcaucasia, {the transitional region between Europe and Asia, extending from the Greater Caucasus to the Turkish and Iranian borders, between the Black and Caspian seas.} in the 2nd century A.D, and subsequently settled in the lower Volga region. They emerged as a force in the 7th century and rose to great power. By the 8th century the Khazar empire extended from the northern shores of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea to the Urals and as far westward as Kiev. Also in the 8th Century, the Khazars converted to the Hebrew religion and made Judaism the State religion. “Itil” the Khazar capital in the Volga delta, was a great commercial center. The Khazar Empire fell, when Sviatoslav, duke of Kiev (945–72), son of Igor and of St. Olga, defeated its army in 965 A.D. The Khazars are the progenitors of European Jewry, the entomology of the term Jew or Jewish probably relates to these people. {Hebrews were not known as Jews}.

Farther east, in Central Asia, the Uighur were driven out of Mongolia and settled in the 9th century in what is now the Xinjiang region of northwestern China. Some Uighur moved westward into what is now Uzbekistan, where they forsook nomadic pastoralism for a sedentary lifestyle. These people became known as Uzbek, named for a ruler of a local Mongol dynasty of that name.

The Mongol conquests, which began in the early 13th century, caused a general series of movements of the Turkic peoples that continued for several centuries. The Mongols eventually brought under their domination almost all the areas held or inhabited by Turkic peoples. The Kipchak, a Turkic people who had moved from the Irtysh River southwest across Kazakhstan to establish themselves in what is now southwestern Russia, were destroyed by the expanding Mongols in 1239, and the last remnants of the declining Seljuq empire in Persia were likewise subjugated. But when the Mongol empire was divided following Genghis Khan's death (1227), a process of Islamization and Turkification ensued that resulted in the virtual absorption by the Turks of those Mongols outside Mongolian territory. The influence of the Mongol rulers diminished, and real power in Central Asia passed to their Turkic provincial governors, one of whom, Timur, was able to extend his own authority over most of southwestern Asia and parts of South Asia, in the late 14th century. In the 15th century, Russian expansion south toward the Caspian Sea drove the Turkic inhabitants there eastward into what is now Kazakhstan, where they are known as Kazakh.

Because of these processes of migration, conquest, intermarriage, and assimilation, many of the Turkic peoples that now inhabit Central and Southwest Asia are of mixed origins, often stemming from fragments of many different tribes, though they speak closely related languages. Apart from the Turks of Turkey, none of the Turkic peoples can be said to have had any continuous national or political existence until the formation, after the Russian Revolution of 1917, of the various Soviet republics and, after 1955, of the Xinjiang region in China. The achievement of independence by Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan in 1991 was the most important political development among the Turkic peoples since the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The most numerous of the Turkic peoples, after the Turks of Turkey, is the Uzbek of Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. Their name seems to have originated from Beg, the greatest khan of the Golden Horde, who embraced Islam; the name came to be applied to the Muslim ruling class of the Golden Horde.

Another numerous group is the Kazakh, who are thought to have been formed from the Kipchak tribes that constituted part of the Golden Horde. Most of them live in Kazakhstan; there are also a large number of Chinese Kazakh in Xinjiang and neighboring Gansu and Qinghai provinces of China.

The Kyrgyz, whose origin is obscure, chiefly inhabit Kyrgyzstan. There is a small minority of Kyrgyz in Afghanistan and western China.

The Turkmen were until 1924 a nomadic tribal people with no political unity. Most of them live in Turkmenistan; there are also large groups in Iran and Afghanistan and others in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.

The Azerbaijani, who inhabit Azerbaijan and northwestern Iran, are one people; they were divided between the Russian and Persian empires in 1828 by the Treaty of Turkmanchay.

The Karakalpak, who are closely allied to the Kazakh, inhabit Karakalpakstan, which is a portion of Uzbekistan. The Tatars consist of two groups, those living in Tatarstan, a republic in Russia, and those inhabiting the Crimean Peninsula; the latter were deported from their homes en masse in 1944, and forcibly resettled in Uzbekistan, but since 1989 they have been returning to Crimea. The Tatars in Tatarstan are thought to be descended from indigenous Turkic tribes of the Kipchak group. It is probable, however, that they also contain Bulgarian elements.

The Bashkir are widely dispersed in the eastern part of European Russia, where they have their own republic, and beyond the Ural Mountains. Although the Bashkir language is purely Turkic, their culture is mixed; some ethnographers believe that they were originally Hungarian.

The Karachay and Balkar of the Russian Caucasus Mountains are of uncertain origin. In the course of many centuries, they have become mixed with the Ossetes (Ossetians), from whom they are anthropologically indistinguishable. They were deported during World War II to areas in Central Asia but have since been allowed to return.

The Sakha of Siberia are classified as a Turkic people because of their language, but little is known of their origin. They are believed to have emigrated northward from the region of Lake Baikal; their culture is in some respects identifiable with that of adjoining Siberian peoples.

The Chuvash are one of the largest non-Slav communities inhabiting the Volga region of southwestern Russia. They are Russian Orthodox Christians, and only their language suggests that they are of Turkic origin.

The Uighur form the predominant population of the Xinjiang region of western China; a small number live in the Central Asian republics as well.

Turks are also known as: Azerbaijani, Bashkir, Chuvash, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar, Turkmen, Uighur, Uzbek, and Sakha.

The Ottoman Empire