Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times. Vol. 1: The Dynastic Periods: From Antiquity to the Fourteenth Century by Richard G. s> Hovannisian Modern Armenia: People, Nation, State by Gerard J. s> Libaridian (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS I47 Hovannisian, Richard G. Armenian People fromAncient toModernTimes.Vol.s. TheDynastic Periods. From Antiquity totheFourteenth Centugy. Second edition. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2004. xii + 372 pp. Notes. Maps. Dynastic Tables.Bibliography.Index. (i 7.99 (paperback). Libaridian, Gerard J. ModernArmenia.People,Nation, State. Transaction Publishers,New Brunswick,NJ and London, 2004. xi + 327 pp. Notes. Bibliography.Index. ?30.50. THESE two books stand in a distinctive counterpart to one another, the key connecting thread being the precarious issue of political and human geography . Formuch of Armenia's history its relationshipto the East Anatolian plateau -below the Caucasus,above the Mesopotamian plain -provided it with, if not advantage as a crossroadsbetween civilizations,at the very least a protected position fromwhich to ride out the stormof invasion and conquest. Even when the classical era of dynastic rule was long gone, geography supported a default position which, for centuries into the medieval period, enabled the great, albeit competing aristocraticfamilies of the tablelands to play off imperial hegemons, whether Western or Eastern, and to reassert,in the tenth century AD, a series of small kingdoms and principalitiescovering over a million square miles. Does size matter?Clearly, yes, if regarded from today's entirely rump 29,0000 square miles of state, which independent as it may be is otherwise weak, landlocked but, equally importantly, an almost strategicirrelevance. While, thus, Hovannisian's volume is arguablythe stuff of nationalist celebration, Libaridian'stone is altogether more sombre. It is hardly surprising given the backdrop of Armenia's modern experience: its westernOttoman populationto allintentsandpurposesdestroyedordispersed in the Aghet of I915- I6, its independent post-tsaristexistence on the Russian side of the border extinguished almost at birth by the Soviets, yet with postSoviet Russia almost the only place to which the current Armenian regime can turn as it seeks to hold on to the contested Azeri territoryof NagornoKarabakh . Hovannisian's edited collection is certainly testimony to the longue dure'e of survival.Yet as an essentiallynarrative-basedand hence ratherold-fashioned political history it is, despite the word 'people' in its title, primarily about Armenian people at the top. With swordsand sceptresin theirhands and the dispensing of patronage and ecclesiastical power, the Armenian centuries certainlyread as one of bewilderingcomplexity in the intersticesof the greater struggles between Persians, Romans, Arabs, Seljuks, Mongols, Byzantines, Ottomans, Safavidsand Crusaders.As for the 'people':well, there is certainly some interesting discussion on the origins and ethnology of HayastanPhrygian , post-Urartean, or most likely a composite of these, plus more indigenous as well as other Indo-European speaking peoples, but it is clear thatthe criticalgel inArmenianidentity-formationwasnot simplyChristianization but, rather, the creation of a specifically Armenian national church which, as Nina Garsoianpoints out in one of her many chaptersin this book, 'provideda focus for the allegiance of the entirepopulation [.. .] independent of the politicalframeworkand consequentlyfromthe fate of the realm'(p. 84). 148 SEER, 84, I, 2006 It is a pity there is not more development of this theme. Culture, the emergence of distinct ecclesiastical texts and histories, the literary and theological interplay between the Greek and Persian worlds are neatly, indeed, lovingly developed by Robert Thomson and Peter Cowe, but a sense of the demotic, at any time or place, is very limited, almost to the point where the only role for Armenian men(women, of course, except again for very powerful ones, are not present here!)is as cannon-fodder in Armenia's many catastrophic medieval battles. Paradoxically, it was exactly such sacrifices which were the very stuffof a romantic nineteenth-century salvation-history and, hence, a crucialadjunctto the 'national'revivalof the Zartonk. The battle of Avarayr, in 450, in which the great majority of the Armenian nobility perished in the face of the Persianhost, thus served the idea of national antiOttoman struggleas if it were a 'Surb Gords', a holy task, mirroringclosely, thereby, Serbianfantasiesassociatedwith the I389 'fieldof blackbirds'(Battle of Kosovo). Fostered by young, middle-class, increasingly Westernized Armenians, whether educated in Tiflis, Constantinople, or indeed Rome or Paris, it was nevertheless the peasant communities of the east who bore the brunt of Dashnak and Hnchak ardour, revolutionary taxation, not to say insurgencies,as they so fatallybackfiredin the mid-I8gos. What is excellent about...