Stormig Posted May 22, 2004 Report Share Posted May 22, 2004 http://www.stanford.edu/group/asa/docs/arch.htm I hope the authors don't mind me copy-pasting this here - sometimes websites go offline, and we've seen good things being lost all too often - so here goes: Archaeology and Identity: Historical Revisionism and Archaeological Modification in Constructions of the Past, Present, and Future Michelle Touton March 2004 Archaeology of the Modern World W. L. Rathje …thousands of years of battles, conquests, feuds, hatreds, and cleansings. In this milieu, the past changes as quickly as the present. And if the past resists revision, it can simply be destroyed. (Rathje 1999:94) As a ship is steered by the direction of its rudder, so is the future of a people steered by its past. Folklore and ancient customs mold the young generation into a continuation of their forebears, maintaining the culture throughout the centuries, while monuments and places of significance to the people’s past mark out a homeland that belongs to them and give the culture as a whole a focus. The world community’s perception of a people’s past and its longevity on the landscape largely define its status and influence in modern times. Nowhere is this principle more evident than in the Middle East, where civilization first flourished. Diverse cultures have lived together, warred against each other, conquered and been conquered, for millennia. As a result of this prolonged interaction the entire region is a potpourri of individuals from different cultures all living in the same towns, playing out on a smaller scale the same struggles that engaged their ancient empires. This mixing is especially true of border regions that have been passed between cultures from time immemorial, where populations may be evenly split between two or three cultures, each of which has some sort of ancestral claim on the land from one time or another. In these cases, historical precedence—who lived here first—assumes utmost importance in defining which culture is “legitimate” or “native” to the land and which were later usurpers. Those deemed to have arrived later are often put at a disadvantage in social and business relationships or may be forced off the land altogether. Being able to demonstrate one’s history and antiquity is of vital importance in such regions, not just for cultural identity but often for cultural existence. Every person has a slightly different understanding of history, which he or she considers to be absolute truth, and which also conveniently tends to portray the individual in the most positive light possible. Similarly, every culture group has a collective memory of a slightly different past than that known to its neighbors. Each group attempts to reshape the “official” past (that recognized by the most respected groups of the world community) to more closely match their own construction—a process known as past mastering, or vergangenheitsbewältigung (especially when used to describe German attempts to deal with the Nazi era; Meskell 2002). I submit that these attempts at past mastering can be divided into two categories: historical revisionism and archaeological modification. Historical revisionism can be defined as essentially a retelling through print or other media of the past, tweaking the story slightly (or sometimes more than slightly) to best favor one particular interpretation. Although highly influential in affecting the opinions of its contemporary audience, most historical revisions are easily retold in a different light or even disproved, and thus their permanent effect on our understanding of the past is only minimal to moderate. Archaeological modification can be defined as “tampering with the evidence,” so to speak, of the past. This is a much more permanent method of redefinition. Once a codex has been burned, a temple’s inscriptions erased and rewritten, or a domestic structure demolished, there is no way to restore that artifact to its original condition. Indeed, unless it had been extensively documented prior to the modification, archaeologists of the future may believe the artifact or structure to be in original condition and never even consider that a modification or destruction may have been committed. The effects of archaeological modification on how we understand the past, therefore, are moderate to severe, and more often the latter. In order to better explore and understand how these two processes come into play in our construction of the past, consider the case of Armenia. A small state located between Turkey, Georgia, and Azerbaijan in Asia Minor, Armenia has been the focus of major controversy due to one event in its past that is painful to the memories of all peoples involved and their descendants. What makes Armenia’s case particularly compelling is the subsequent dispersal of Armenians throughout the world, involving this small ethnic group in the collective pasts of many different nations and cultures and thus giving virtually all of the Western world an interest in settling on an official interpretation of this people’s past. Map taken from Viviano 2004. The precise moment of ethnogenesis of the Armenian culture, like that of virtually every culture, is impossible to determine. However, it can be stated with some certainty that the culture we now know as Armenian grew from a mixing of the native Urartian people with an immigrant people from the West, possibly from the Balkans,[1] after the Medes defeated Urartu in the first millennium BCE. An Armenian state formed, which was then conquered in 552 by the Persian king Darius I. Within Persian and later Greek hegemony, the Orontid dynasty arose to rule Armenia from 331 until 189 BCE, when the country was partitioned between two Armenian kings. This partition between Eastern Armenia and Western Armenia would continue to the present with few exceptions (Hovannisian 1981). The high point of Armenian history occurred during the rule of Tigran the Great (95 to 55 BCE), who not only reunited Armenia and secured its sovereignty by skillfully playing one great empire against the other, but expanded its borders to form the empire of Greater Armenia. However, Greater Armenia was overextended and was quickly retaken and repartitioned by Rome, who gladly allowed Armenian kings to administrate the region if that would keep the area submissive to Rome and inaccessible to Persia. In the early 4th century[2] King Trdat (or Tiridates) was converted to Christianity by St. Gregory the Illuminator—now the patron saint of Armenia—and declared the entire country Christian. For the next millennium Armenia would be passed back and forth between empires, a Christian people in a sea of Zoroastrian and later Muslim cultures, finally being taken by the Turkmen dynasty in the early 15th century and remaining in Turkish hands until World War I (Shnirelman 2001). As the Pan-Turkic movement gained steam in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Western Armenian population under the hegemony of the Ottoman Empire was subjected to a series of massacres and deportations, culminating in the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1918 during which as many as 1.5 million Armenians were sent on death marches through the desert or systematically murdered in a program of ethnic cleansing. During those bloody decades, millions of Armenians immigrated to such diverse countries as Russia, Persia, Egypt, Lebanon, France, the United States, Argentina, and even Australia (Papajian 1974), creating a diaspora community that to this day outnumbers the Hayastantsi community[3]. The defeat of the Ottoman Empire at the hands of the Allies allowed the declaration of an independent Republic of Armenia in 1918. However, in late 1920 Turkey again invaded Armenia, resulting in a 1920 peace treaty at Alexandropol that returned Western Armenia to Turkish control, and in December 1921 the Soviet Union annexed the remnants of the infant republic (Tarzizian 1992). The generation of Armenians who came of age in the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, especially in the diaspora, were outraged by the ignorance of the international community with regard to the Genocide. In the late 1970s and early 1980s a handful of frustrated Armenian youths began a series of terrorist attacks against Turkish targets, killing dozens of people. Heinous and universally denounced, these attacks nonetheless brought the issue of genocide denial to international attention, and a series of diplomatic victories in the late 80s cooled the anger of Armenians worldwide (Walker 1990). The past decade has witnessed the fall of the Soviet Union and the Communist threat that made Turkey an invaluable ally not to be crossed, an increased activism among Diaspora communities within their own governments, and a Turkey desperate enough to be accepted into the European Union that it has begun to loosen restrictions on scholarly publications and access to its archives from the Ottoman period. Although Turkey still officially denies the Genocide, most Western nations—as well as a growing number of Turkish scholars—have begun to formally recognize it and to begin the process of reconciliation (Cooper 2004, Viviano 2004). Historical Revisionism Before the recent globalization trend allowed increased academic freedoms and access to sources from outside one’s own culture, most historians of the region could be identified with one of three caricatures: (1) the Turkish Revisionist, who feels guilt from the Genocide and thus threatened by the constant reminder of Armenians’ continuing existence, (2) the Armenian Nationalist, who has been stung by past injuries and is determined to prove to the world that the victimized Armenians flourished on the Armenian plateau thousands of years before anyone else showed up, and (3) the Soviet Bureaucrat, who is eager to exploit Armenian nationalist claims in order to extract land and resources from Turkey, but at the same time fears that these same claims might not only lead the Armenian SSR to secession but might encourage other Soviet republics to do the same. All three personas have an agenda far beyond the scholastic; compounded and exacerbated by each other, their retellings of Armenian history are so unlike each other that they may as well be telling the stories of three different peoples. Let us consider each in turn. The Turkish Revisionist The Turkish Revisionist, when writing about Armenian history, generally has very little to say about events preceding the First World War. If he says anything at all, it will most likely be that the Turks were either native to Anatolia or migrated into the region several thousand years before the Armenians showed up, and that since the landless latecomers arrived a thousand or fewer years ago they have been trying to usurp the natal land of the proud Turkish race (thus, the claims of genocide are simply the latest ploy to snatch land away from Turkey). Indeed, everything the Turkish Revisionist writes about Armenia ties back into the events of 1915-1920 in one form or another. His goal is to prove that only a proportionally small number of Armenians died in those years, and those as an unfortunate and unintentional result of civil war caused by rebellious Armenian freedom-fighters seeking to betray their country to the advancing Russian forces (c.f. Anon. 1986). Although outwardly an attack on Armenian longevity and reputation, a more thorough consideration of the circumstances in which these historians wrote reveals that these statements and retellings are largely defensive. In the last several decades especially, the Western world has become preoccupied with human rights and has taken serious sanctions against violators. Although the atrocities of 1915 were perpetrated by the Ottoman regime rather than the modern Turkish government, and although Armenians in Turkey are no longer massacred, Turkey fears that by owning up to its predecessor’s genocidal intent it will not only face international embarrassment but will also be hit with sanctions—possibly even the loss of territory—and barred from associations and trade relationships with Western nations. Accordingly, the national archives for the period of interest have been closed (despite repeated promises to open them, c.f. Anon. 1986, Walker 1990) to any scholar whose works have not been approved by the Turkish government. Generations of Turkish schoolchildren have been taught that nothing happened, and that anyone who says otherwise has been fooled by Armenian propaganda, while intellectuals have been carefully censored in their public appearances and publications. The Armenian Nationalist The Armenian Nationalist, like all nationalists, has a tendency to glorify his nation’s history to the exclusion of all else. His people were of great and noble stock, known and respected the world over, before they fell under subjugation by an oppressive barbarian race. Despite having been trampled underfoot for centuries, his people remained gentle but proud, and deserve the world’s admiration, respect, pity, and aid. The Armenian Nationalist writes that Armenians have inhabited the Armenian plateau since Noah landed on Mt. Ararat, that the Urartians were not displaced by the proto-Armenians but actually were the proto-Armenians, and that since, in fact, Armenia was the Indo-European homeland, clearly all of Western Civilization owes its origins to the Armenians (c.f. Samuelian 2000). On the matter of the Genocide, which is naturally a popular topic, he spends a great portion of his treatise arguing that for the last hundred years a select elite of the Ottoman or Turkish government has sat in a back room, smoking cigars and brainstorming ideas on how to destroy the Armenians. Failing that, he declares that the Moslem Turkish people as a whole have had it in for the Christian Armenians since they first started living together (c.f. Sarkisian 1965). These historians feel a sting of neglected oppression; their ancestors (often as closely-related as their aunts and uncles) were brutally murdered and yet the Western world has blindly accepted Turkey’s denial because it doesn’t want to offend an ally in such a strategic location. Although a significant portion of the English and French offerings are written by diasporans, the majority of these historians are Hayastantsis who have not only been immersed in the fatalism of a shattered people all their lives, but only have access to works by other Armenian Nationalists like themselves. Accordingly, stories get embellished, statistics get slightly augmented, and a proud nation is not only murdered once again but their cemetery is torn up stone by stone by complicit governments worldwide. Although rooted in unpleasant fact, these historians are more akin to storytellers than scholars. The Soviet Bureaucrat The Soviet Bureaucrat has never been quite sure what to say about Armenia; on the one hand he doesn’t want to encourage nationalism among any of the Soviet states for fear of rebellion, but on the other hand Armenian nationalism has the peculiar quality of being anti-Turkic and thus Russophilic (Shnirelman 2001). His official retelling of Armenian history has swung from one end of the spectrum to the other as the immediate threats and opportunities before the Soviet Union have changed. Accordingly, immediately after the war, when memories and emotions were strong but the Soviet Union weak, he wrote—in as few pages as possible—that Armenia had always been a small, insignificant cultural backwater that never really occupied any territory outside of the Armenian SSR (Shnirelman 2001). By the middle of the century, however, when the Soviet Union had strong hopes for a breakup of Turkey and the possible transfer of large portions of its land to the USSR, his publications grew to be functionally equivalent to those of the Armenian Nationalist—indeed, the Armenian Nationalist was greatly encouraged by this sudden recognition and became much more prolific. Toward the end of the century, as the Soviet Union faltered, the “official story” of the origins of Armenia and its recent history became less often told and less often enforced, and with the death of the USSR in 1991 the Soviet Bureaucrat put down his pen and left the Turkish Revisionist and the Armenian Nationalist to duke it out with no moderator. Historical revisionism is usually the first approach taken by a society seeking to master its past. It does not require state-sanctioned efforts or lunatics with bombs, but rather tends to be exercised by individual scholars. Moreover, as the “truth” of the past is often obscure and always debatable, it may not even occur to these scholars that they are seeing only the evidence they want to see, or are not telling the entire story. What may begin as an honest mistake by one scholar can snowball as each of his or her readers and students begins to adopt the same line, but extend it a step or two further. After half a century of accumulated historical revisionism we end up with stories as different from each other as those of the Turkish Revisionist, the Armenian Nationalist, and the Soviet Bureaucrat—none exactly true, but each very compelling to its own limited audience. Archaeological Modification “According to a 1931 study during the genocide of 1915-22, 1,036 Armenian churches and monasteries were leveled to the ground while 691 other religious structures were half-destroyed.” (Kouymjian 1984:174) While playing around with historical writings has affected the way contemporary people view the Armenian past, far more severe have been the effects of archaeological modification. One means of denying the Genocide ever took place is to deny that Armenians ever lived in the area, a claim which is easily refuted by the presence of Armenian cultural monuments such as medieval churches, cemeteries, and khatchkars (a type of distinctly Armenian stela with a cross engraved in the center and ornate vine- or grillwork surrounding). Accordingly, especially in the period immediately following the removal of the Armenian population but continuing in a form up to the present day, the Turkish government has been defacing, misattributing, or even outright destroying the archaeological remains of the ancient Armenian culture. 13th Century khatchkar from Hagardzin, Armenia (CeltoSlavica 2004) Although it has occurred all over Turkish Armenia, this destructive practice can be best seen in the city of Ani and its surrounding hamlets. Founded sometime around the 5th century CE (although structures exist in Ani from as early as the Bronze Age), the city of Ani rose to glory in the 10th century when the Bagratid dynasty moved its capital from Kars to Ani. In 992 the Armenian catholicosate[4] moved its seat to the burgeoning city, marking Ani as not just the economic and political capital of Armenia but also its spiritual center. By the 11th century the “City of a Thousand and One Churches” had a population of between 100,000 and 200,000 (VirtualANI 2004). Given to the Byzantines as ransom when the empire captured the Armenian king in 1045, the city was then captured by the Seljuks in 1071, who then promptly turned around and sold it to the Kurdish Shaddidid dynasty in 1072. Georgia conquered the area at the beginning of the 13th century and gave the city to the Mkhargrdzeli dynasty, who ruled the city first for Georgia and later for the Mongols who invaded in 1237. By the mid-14th century the area came under Turkish control, and became a part of the Ottoman Empire in 1579. The population had begun to flee the city with the Mongol invasions, however, and by the 17th century there was only a small town left in the city center. The indefensible community fell prey to nomadic tribes, and the ruins of the city were finally abandoned by the end of the 18th century (VirtualANI 2004). Khtzkonk in 1920 and today. Only the church of St. Sarkis remains (VirtualANI 2004). Although the remains of the city had fallen into disrepair, the ancient churches, monasteries, and cemeteries were still largely sound at the arrival of European travelers in the 19th century, as evidenced by their extensive journals and drawings[5]. Too close to the Armenian border, the region was closed by the Turkish military in 1920 and all remaining Armenian residents were expelled. Since the late 1950s it has been reopened to those who obtain a special permit, but no photographs or drawings are allowed (VirtualANI 2004). The Ani seen today is very different from the Ani reported by the 19th century classicists: where there had once been a city full of beautiful but abandoned churches and monasteries, there now was a desolate wasteland of few buildings whatsoever. As simply one example, consider the monastery of Khtzkonk, built most likely in the 10th and 11th centuries and abandoned after the Mongol invasions of the 13th century. The monastery was returned to the Armenian Church after Russia took over the region, and returned to active use until Turkey dispelled its occupants in 1920. Visitors to the site before its final emptying were treated to a complex of five cut-stone churches on a series of spurs overlooking a gorge, each a fine example of traditional Armenian church architecture. When the monastery was next visited by historians in 1959, only one church, St. Sarkis, remained standing—and even St. Sarkis was severely damaged. VirtualANI describes the devastation: Lumps of masonry from the destroyed churches have been flung far from their original positions. The slopes between the spurs are filled with shattered fragments of stonework, chunks of inscription covered wall, fragments of columns, and bits of ornate sculpture. The damage to the St. Sargis church is even more indicative - the side walls of the apses and chapels have been blown outwards, evidently by explosives placed within them. The location of a dated piece of modern graffiti (positioned so that it was lit by a window that is now destroyed) suggests that the destruction took place sometime after 1955. The inhabitants of Digor [a nearby village] are vague on the actual date, only saying "about 30 years ago.” (http://www.virtualani.freeserve.co.uk/khtzkonk/khtzkonk.htm) When the historians quizzed the villagers about what had befallen the churches, they answered that the Turks had blown them up. Turkey maintains the ancient buildings were hit by falling rocks (VirtualANI 2004). The fate of Khtzkonk is unfortunately not an isolated incident—the whole region around the city of Ani has been depopulated of its once rich Armenian archaeological heritage. Consider just the hamlets around Magazberd, an early fortress/settlement about four km southwest of Ani (VirtualANI 2004). · St. Anania Church in Alem, built in 637, in good condition in 1920, now totally destroyed. · The Church of St. Stephen the Protomartyr, built around 650, in good condition in the 1920s, now totally destroyed. · The ruins of a single-naved church adjacent to St. Stephen—no trace remains. · The basilica of Nakhijevan—gone. · The stately churches of Varzahan, surveyed and extensively photographed by a German archaeologist in 1911, totally destroyed sometime between 1920 and the 1950s including the nearby cemetery (although its more impressive gravestones may have been sent to the museum in Erzurum where they are identified as Turkish in origin). Destroyed frescoes at the church of Tigran Honents (VirtualANI) Or consider the case of the Church of Tigran Honents, built in 1215 and covered internally with frescoes depicting the life of Christ and the life of St. Gregory the Illuminator. Officially to tidy up the frescoes, which had been prey to graffiti, in the 1990s they were simply whitewashed or chipped off of the walls (VirtualANI 2004). In his paper presented before the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal in 1984, Dickran Kouymjian identifies eight ways in which the Turkish government has destroyed or is destroying Armenian cultural monuments (Kouymjian 1985). 1. Willful destruction by fire or explosives of churches, civil buildings and homes during the period of the massacres, 1915-22. 2. Subsequent, but conscious, destruction of individual monuments by dynamite or artillery.[6] 3. Destruction by willful neglect and the encouragement of trespassing by peasants.[7] 4. Conversion of Armenian churches into mosques, prisons, granaries, stables and farms, and museums.[8] 5. Destruction by failure to provide any maintenance.[9] 6. Demolition for the construction of roads or public works.[10] 7. Neutralization of a monument’s Armenian identity by the effacing of Armenian inscriptions.[11] 8. As a final resort, especially for monuments well known to art historians, the intentional reattribution of a building to Turkish, usually medieval Seljuk Turkish, architecture[12] Although Armenia presents a particularly compelling case because of its earlier genocide and the intervening historical revisionism, the destruction of the cultural heritage of a minority by the ruling majority (or simply an invading people) is certainly not limited to Anatolian soil. Kouymjian’s list could just as easily be applied to Armenian monuments in Azerbaijan (Mkrtchyan 2002), Serbian churches in Kosovo (VirtualANI 2004), or even Rome’s destruction of Carthage. Since the beginning of statehood, the next step after decimating a people has been to destroy the remnants of their material culture and thus strike their memories from existence. Most recently in the news has been the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban in 2001. Although the Taliban explained to an outraged international community that it had been driven to destroy the immense statues over frustration that Western nations wanted to invest large amounts of money in their preservation while a million Afghans were starving (Meskell 2002), clearly the real reason for the destruction was a need to reinforce the Taliban’s rule by destroying the sacred sites and monuments of dissident religions, and in so doing stamp out the religions themselves (Rathje in press). Lynn Meskell identifies this site as a prime example of negative heritage—a sort of perennial thorn in the side of an entire culture—that had to be eliminated in order to sustain current ideology. By destroying the physical reminders of Buddhism in Afghanistan, the perpetrators sought to remove all traces of pre-Islamic culture in the region and thus not only be able to claim that the dominant Muslim culture created order and cultural fluorescence out of the primitive ways of the barbarians who had previously dominated the landscape, but also eliminate any ideological alternatives to Islamic rule. Many of the world’s cultural monuments have recently faced archaeological modification by a group presumably attempting to deal with sites of negative heritage. Meskell identifies the Mostar Bridge and Dubrovnik in the Balkans, destroyed in the recent war, the Taj Mahal, defaced by a group of right-wing Hindu militants, and ironically even an Ottoman fort in Mecca which was destroyed by Saudi Arabia, ostensibly to accommodate the growing number of pilgrims (Meskell 2002). Although nowhere in the world is exempt, archaeological modification most often proves a problem in regions of highly fragmented or densely packed ethnic groups, as their ideal pasts must strongly conflict with one another. In such regions archaeological modification takes place on all levels, from the young miscreant who spray-paints a moustache on a fresco to the governmental work crew that demolishes a thousand-year-old church. Implications Past mastering in the form of historical revisionism and especially archaeological modification is one of the greatest threats facing world patrimony today. When militant cultures modify the past in order to serve their current needs and future desires, it is not only the slighted group but students of the past the world over who suffer. Increasing worldwide communication through translations of publications into many languages and technological innovations such as the internet are exposing individuals to many different sources of information about the past, thus making it harder for one group to surreptitiously censor or modify the past through historical revisionism. However, archaeological modification remains as potent a threat as ever. Greater demolition technology may have even exacerbated the problem, allowing the perpetrators to totally destroy a building or monument through strategically-placed explosives or bulldozing. Whereas ancient armies had to physically remove each stone by hand, leaving foundations or other archaeological evidence of the structure’s existence, today a small crew or even a single individual can within minutes destroy any reconstructable traces of a centuries-old structure, erasing it from the archaeological record for all time. This sort of violent, permanent modification of the past appeals strongly to militants in all of the world’s hotspots, resulting in the wanton destruction of many of the world’s priceless heritage sites and artifacts. Until nations the world over come to see these methods of past mastering as a problem that must be dealt with, the destruction will continue and even increase. Repeated attempts at management from the international level by the United Nations and scores of treaties have failed; in the end each nation is accountable only to itself and its people, and to most people a proud past is more desirable than an accurate past. And yet these past masterers often do not realize that they are playing with a double-edged sword: by destroying the past of other cultures, by which they intend to show the world their greatness, they will be remembered by historians and archaeologists of the future as a barbaric and wantonly destructive race. The sad irony is that by attempting to deny their enemies a place in the past, cultures guilty of historical revisionism or archaeological modification may be assuring themselves an ignoble place in the future. And with such a false and fragmented past, everyone loses. Works Cited (Anonymous) 1986 Armenian Allegations: Myth and Reality: A Handbook of Facts and Documents. The Assembly of Turkish American Associations, Washington, DC. CeltoSlavica (2004) http://www.celtoslavica.de/imago/_haghardzin.html (Primarily in German but portions translated into English, French, or Russian) Cooper, Belinda 2004 Turks Breach Wall of Silence on Armenians. In The New York Times. Arts section, March 6, 2004. Available online at Hovannisian, Richard G. 1981 The Armenian Image in History and Literature. Undena Publications, Malibu, California. Hewsen, Robert H. 1986 “In Search of Tiridates the Great.” In Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies, Vol. 2, 1985 – 1986, pp 11-49. Society for Armenian Studies, Los Angeles. Kouymjian, Dickran 1985 The Destruction of Armenian Historical Monuments as a Continuation of the Turkish Policy of Genocide. In A Crime of Silence: The Armenian Genocide, papers presented to the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal Session on the Genocide of the Armenians, pp. 173-185. The Pitman Press, Bath. Lang, David Marshall 1980 Armenia: Cradle of Civilization. (Third Edition) George Allen & Unwin, London. Meskell, L. 2002 Negative Heritage and Past Mastering in Archaeology. In Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 75, No. 3. pp. 557-574. Mkrtchyan, Shahen 2002 Vandalism: A Collection of Evidential and Documentary Materials About the Destruction and Misappropriation of the Heritage of Armenian-Christian Culture in Azerbaijan. (trans. Suren Musayelyan) Noyan Tapan, Yerevan. Papajian, Rev. Sarkis 1974 A Brief History of Armenia. Mid-Cal Publishers, Fresno, California. Rathje, W.L. 1999 Kosovo and the Archaeologists. Discovering Archaeology Vol. 1, No. 4. pp. 92-95. In press Archaeological Terrorism: What’s Behind the Assassination of Two Colossal Buddhas. Discovering Archaeology. Samuelian, Thomas 2000 Armenian Origins: An Overview of Ancient and Modern Sources and Theories. Iravunq Publishing House, Yerevan. Sarkisian, E. K., and R. G. Sahakian 1965 Vital Issues in Modern Armenian History. Elisha B. Chrakian, trans. and ed. Concord Press, West Concord, Massachusetts. Shnirelman, Victor A. 2001 The Value of the Past: Myths, Identity and Politics in Transcaucasia. Senri Ethnological Studies no. 57. National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka. Silberman, Neil Asher 1989 Between Past and Present: Archaeology, Ideology, and Nationalism in the Modern Middle East. Henry Holt and Company, New York. Tarzian, Mary Mangigian 1992 The Armenian Minority Problem. (Original Ph.D. thesis submitted 1935) University of Pennsylvania Armenian Texts and Studies, Volume 11. Scholars Press, Atlanta, Georgia. VirtualANI (2004) http://www.virtualani.freeserve.co.uk Viviano, Frank 2004 “The Rebirth of Armenia.” In National Geographic Magazine, March 2004, pp 28-49. Walker, Christopher J. 1990 Armenia: The Survival of a Nation (2nd ed.). St Martin’s Press, New York. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] The primary evidence for the origin of these immigrants is linguistic—Armenian is an Indo-European language and Urartian is not, so the (linguistic) ancestors had to come from Indo-Europe. [2] Traditionally 301 CE, although a few contemporary scholars have suggested that a date of 311-314 is more accurate (c.f. Hewsen 1986). [3] The Armenian people refer to themselves as “Hayk” and their nation as “Hayastan.” In Armenian the suffix –tsi identifies one’s place of origin, thus a Hayastantsi was born in Armenia, a Haleptsi is from Aleppo, Syria, and a Fresnotsi is from Fresno, California. [4] The catholicos is the spiritual father of the Armenian Orthodox church, as the pope is the spiritual father of the Roman Catholic church. [5] For samples of these writings and drawings, as well as an extensive bibliography on the subject, visit the VirtualANI project online. All images of Ani are taken from this online resource. [6] e.g., Tekor basilica, Khtzkonk monastery, Ani churches Holy Mother of God, Bagaran, and Arakelan [7] e.g., Soradir, Abad Ghamrentz [8] e.g., Kars (museum), Ordu (prison), Urfa cathedral (mosque) Varag monastery (farm) [9] e.g., Church of the Holy Cross on the island of Aght’amar, cathedral of Ani, all monuments in Turkey [10] e.g., Holy Saviour church in Ani [11] e.g., All churches/fortresses of Cilicia, Ordu, central school in Istanbul [12] e.g., Churches at Kars and Aght’amar; note that unless any physical changes were made to the buildings these are cases of historical revisionism rather than archaeological modification. 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Teutonic Knight Posted May 22, 2004 Report Share Posted May 22, 2004 BRILLIANT!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bellthecat Posted May 22, 2004 Report Share Posted May 22, 2004 (edited) Hmmm ... I'll read it carefully and make some comments later. However, no mater how worthy the end product is, if someone wants to make extensive use of someone elses material in the form of quotes then it is customary to ask permission first (or at the vey least try to inform the original author that it is being done). And if that use goes as far as using someone elses photos then it is a legal obligation! Something which this Michelle Touton person did not do. Steve PS - did you notice this other essay by the same author American Policy Regarding the Armenian Atrocities Edited May 22, 2004 by bellthecat Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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