Տիգրանակերտ մայրաքաղաքի եւ Ամիդ քաղաքի նույնության մասին / On the Identity of the Capital of Tigranakert and the City of Amid

Abstract

In issue 32 of the "Bulletin of Matenadaran", an article by Gor Yeranyan "The Armenian tradition of calling Amid Tigranakert" was published, in which the author, recognizing that the problem of localizing Tigranakert has not yet been resolved, nevertheless declares that the city of Amida cannot be Tigranakert, since so consider researchers "almost without exception", thereby ignoring published evidence to the contrary. And then he proceeds to clarify the cause, as he believes, of the “confusion”, as a result of which the Armenians began to believe that Amida is Tigranakert. However, in the realm of science, truth cannot be determined by vote. In this case, there are a number of facts that testify precisely to the identity of these cities. In particular, ancient evidence describing the features of the area where the Tigranakert battle took place – the direction of the Tigris River, the narrowness of the battlefield – point specifically to Amida. The message of Memnon is important, who, describing the attack of Lucullus on Armenia, writes about the city of Tigranakert, and, at the same time, also about another city, in which "Tigran keeps his concubines and many treasures." Meanwhile, the city where Tigran kept his concubines is the capital Tigranakert. Thus, Memnon simultaneously reports on two different Tigranakerts, which suggests that there may have been confusion, but it arose even in antiquity, among Greco-Roman authors who did not know about the existence of several cities of the same name. In addition, the very modern name of Amida – Diyarbekir, may be the result of a phonetically regular distortion in a foreign language environment of the name Tigranakert.