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The Research Repository

  1. 2025

    The First of Early Modern Armenian Diplomats: Rethinking Abgar Dpir's Contribution to Armenian National History

    Ghazaryan, Flora

    Takes up the understudied field of early modern Armenian diplomacy through the neglected case of Abgar Dpir's 1562 delegation to Rome, a turning point that provoked aggressive Vatican intervention and deepened the confessional split between Catholic and Apostolic Armenians. Ghazaryan unpicks the mission's motives, allowing for the divergent aims of the parties involved. She argues that Abgar Dpir was not of royal descent, and that the royal pedigree was manufactured by Etchmiadzin's leadership to fit him into the Western 'society of princes' and give the delegation a hearing. She further contends that his celebrated printing activity functioned as cover for the diplomatic mission.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  2. 2025

    The Importance of Paris-based Zhoghovurd (People) Daily Newspaper in Researching the Armenian Diaspora's Involvement in the French Resistance (1941–1945)

    Teteyan, Arshaluys

    Armenian participation in the French Resistance is usually reduced to Missak Manouchian and his group, but the wider Armenian diaspora in France, largely composed of survivors of 1915, wrote many chapters of Resistance history that remain unknown. The article argues that Armenian-language newspapers published in France during and after the war are a major untapped source, focusing on Zhoghovurd, issued in Paris under editor Shahe Tatourian from 1943 to 1948. Its pages carry eyewitness and participant testimony in three groups: memoirs of Armenian Resistance fighters and their fallen comrades; data on the numbers, biographies, and commemorations of Armenian combatants; and reports on Armenians returning from Nazi death camps and the community's efforts to rehabilitate former prisoners.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  3. 2025

    The Problem of Armenian Origins in the Light of Recent Archaeogenetic Data

    Palyan, Aram and Petrosyan, Armen

    Marshals the latest archaeogenetic evidence to re-examine the origins and formation of the Armenian people. The authors argue that, whatever the location of the early Indo-European homeland, the late Indo-European homeland formed in the steppe and forest-steppe of Eastern Europe between the Volga and the Dniester. Genetic data show migration across the Caucasus into the South Caucasus and the Armenian Highland from the mid-third millennium BC, whose descendants created the Trialeti-Vanadzor, Sevan-Artsakh, Van-Urmia and Lchashen-Metsamor cultures. Even at the end of Urartu (7th–6th c. BC) the population of the land of Etiuni still carried roughly 75% steppe patrilineal DNA, which the authors read as support for the Etiuni hypothesis of Armenian ethnogenesis.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  4. 2025

    The Socio-Economic Picture and Political Situation of the Eastern Provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the 1830s and 1840s (According to the English Diplomat James Brant)

    Vardanyan, Sona

    Uses the travelogues and consular reporting of the English diplomat James Brant to reconstruct the socio-economic and political situation of the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the 1830s and 1840s. Vardanyan draws out the demographic shifts working against the Armenian population and reads the power dynamics between Armenians and Kurds in the region.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  5. 2025

    The Struggle between Urartu and Assyria during the Reign of Rusa, Son of Sarduri: According to the Research of C.F. Lehmann-Haupt

    Sargsyan, Vahe

    During their 1898–1899 journey through the Armenian Highlands and northern Mesopotamia, C.F. Lehmann-Haupt and the chemist W. Belck explored the presumed region of Musasir, the spiritual centre of Biainili-Urartu, and copied the Topzawa inscription. Lehmann-Haupt treated this bilingual text as a primary source for reconstructing the conflict between Urartu and Assyria under Rusa, son of Sarduri. Sargsyan shows that several of the pioneer Urartologist's reconstructions remain contested: the identity of the king who commissioned the inscription, the chronology of the events, and the causes and route of Sargon II's 714 BCE campaign.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  6. 2025

    The Study of the Armenian Epigraphic Heritage of the Holy Land: A Bibliographical Survey

    Harutyunyan, Khachik

    Harutyunyan surveys scholarship on Armenian inscriptions and graffiti in the Holy Land, a corpus that begins shortly after the invention of the Armenian alphabet and continues essentially unbroken to the present. The densest concentrations are in Jerusalem, above all the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and in the Basilica of the Nativity, alongside Armenian monasteries and churches. Research in the 1970s and 1980s revealed a large body of Armenian pilgrim graffiti along the route to Sinai, with further inscriptions documented in Nazareth, Bethlehem, Jaffa and Ramleh. His central point is that despite a century and a half of collecting efforts, no comprehensive compilation of this epigraphic heritage exists.

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    2025Journal ArticlePaywalled
  7. 2025

    Կոմիտասն իր նամակների հայելիում (Komitas in the Mirror of His Letters)

    Mnatsakanyan, Yeva

    Treats Komitas: composer, musicologist, folklore collector, teacher, and founder of the Armenian school of composition, as a national symbol whose fate is read as the fate of the Armenian people. The article analyzes the worldview and psychological registers of his letters and the philosophy condensed in them, presenting the vardapet as both a son of his environment and a world-recognized musician with a dramatic inner life. Its aims are to use the letters as an instrument for revealing an inner world, to interpret their key messages from the standpoint of present-day artistic consciousness, and to trace intercultural communication through them. The author concludes that the letters do not fully unlock Komitas, but confirm that he purified, notated, and created 'the majestic homeland of our song.'

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  8. 2025

    "One Unalterable and Indivisible Nature" Through the "Ineffable Union": Armenian Christology and Materiality

    Sheklian, Christopher

    Sheklian brings the Miaphysite Christology of the Armenian Apostolic Church into dialogue with contemporary 'new materialist' theory. He argues that ancient debates over the natures of Christ shaped the very Western philosophical vocabulary of nature, essence, and substance, and that the Armenian tradition — through the term բնութիւն (bnut'iwn) and thinkers such as Khosrovik the Translator, Step'anos Siwnets'i, and Nerses Shnorhali — offers a distinct conceptual configuration of materiality that unsettles Chalcedonian assumptions. He connects these theological differences to present-day philosophical and ecological stakes.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  9. 2025

    A(nother) Urartian Royal Bowl Property of Sarduri (I), Son of Lutipri, from Karmir-blur, Stored in Hermitage Museum

    Novikova, Anna et al.

    Reinterprets a ribbed bronze bowl from Karmir-blur inscribed with the name of King Sarduri as the earliest known bronze inscription of Sarduri, son of Lutipri, the first Urartian sovereign. A second Hermitage bowl bearing a similar inscription shares the same features and is likewise attributed to Sarduri I. Together the two vessels form the missing link between the earliest ribbed bowl and the later plain bronze vessels associated with subsequent Urartian kings. The article thus revises the chronology of Urartian royal metalwork and inscriptions.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  10. 2025

    Armenian Bole (Deposits, Chemical Composition, Application) and References to It in Medieval Armenian Medical Texts

    Sahakyan, Armen

    Traces the historical and modern medical uses of Armenian bole (bolus armenicus), a clay credited with anti-inflammatory and other properties. Its use is attested by Armenian and foreign scholars of the Middle Ages, and it remained significant in both Eastern and Western medicine until the eighteenth century. Sahakyan reports geological and mineralogical analysis of the clay's composition alongside citations from medieval Armenian medical works, and flags its catalytic properties as a subject for future research.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  11. 2025

    Clinging to the Classical: The National Education Council and Armenian-Language Instruction in Constantinople, c. 1860 – c. 1890

    Manoukian, Jennifer

    Manoukian, a historian of the modern Western Armenian language, challenges two widely held assumptions in Armenian studies about nineteenth-century Ottoman Armenian schooling: that the Armenian National Constitution and its National Education Council were transformative reformers of Armenian education, and that Armenian schools spread Modern Western Armenian from the outset. Drawing on primary sources from Constantinople, she shows that Armenian-language instruction in this period stayed wedded to Classical Armenian (grabar), complicating the standard story of a smooth rise of the modern vernacular.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  13. 2025

    Die „bärtigen Jungfrauen". Das Gleichnis von den zehn Jungfrauen (Mt 25,1-13) in Armenien zwischen Exegese und Kunst (The "Bearded Virgins": The Parable of the Ten Virgins in Armenia between Exegesis and Art)

    Pane, Riccardo

    Traces the Armenian exegesis of the parable of the ten virgins from the fifth to the fourteenth century, identifying its Greek sources while highlighting what is distinctively Armenian in it. Pane then turns to two unusual works in which the virgins are depicted as men: a bas-relief at Hovhannavank monastery and a miniature by the copyist Yovsian. Beyond the liturgical and eschatological readings proposed in recent scholarship, he argues that the explanation for these 'bearded virgins' lies in the continuous Armenian exegetical tradition, which reinterpreted the parable with reference to the spirituality of male monastic communities.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  14. 2025

    Essai pour une nouvelle lecture du bas-relief du tympan inférieur du narthex de l'église Saint-Étienne le Protomartyr du monastère de Noravankʻ (Toward a New Reading of the Bas-Relief of the Lower Tympanum of the Narthex of the Church of St. Stephen the Protomartyr, Noravank Monastery)

    Leyloyan-Yekmalyan, Anna

    Re-reads the carved lower tympanum of the Noravank narthex (founded 1261), whose composition centers on the Virgin and Child. The bird beneath the Child's feet is identified as the apocryphal clay bird animated by Jesus's breath, echoing the Father animating Adam; the lion the Child sits on is the Lion of Judah from the vision in Esdras. Old Testament prophets flank the Virgin, and a large letter Ա with a three-pointed arrow aimed at Mary's ear evokes Ephrem the Syrian's conception-through-the-ear formula, reinforced by the word ԲԱՌՆ and the surrounding Armenian inscription, which the author translates. The reading ties Armenian monumental sculpture to apocryphal and patristic exegesis.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  15. 2025

    L'épître 17/77 de Grigor Magistros: Une description de la cathédrale Sainte-Sophie de Constantinople? (Grigor Magistros's Letter 17/77: A Description of Hagia Sophia?)

    Arevshatyan, Anna S.

    In a letter written to his son-in-law for the feast of the Inauguration of the Church, Grigor Magistros recalls the Illuminator's vision of an angel commanding him to found a martyrium. That site, mentioned by Agathangelos, is not precisely known, and Magistros almost certainly never saw it. Arevshatyan therefore proposes that his description is modelled on a building he had seen: Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, then the principal church of the Christian world. She adds that a miniature in a Matenadaran manuscript containing Magistros's complete works shows him standing beside a magnificent church, possibly alluding to the poetic contest at Hagia Sophia in which the Armenian scholar bested an Arab poet by versifying the whole Bible.

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    2025Journal ArticlePaywalled
  16. 2025

    The "Nazlum Family Medical Book": Codex M11161 and Its "Medical Book on Horses"

    Dum-Tragut, Jasmine and Khachatryan, Ovsanna

    Presents the first study of a previously unexamined medical manuscript, Matenadaran codex no. 11161, covering its physical characteristics, provenance, and textual composition. The authors analyze one of its key texts, a book on horses, and compare it with other Armenian medical manuscripts. This lets them date and localize the codex more precisely and situate it in the Armenian medical tradition between medieval Cilicia and early modern Nor Jugha (New Julfa). Khachatryan is based at the Matenadaran; Dum-Tragut heads Armenian Studies at Salzburg.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  17. 2025

    The Agricultural Landscape of Hellenistic Artaxata

    Orendi, Andrea

    Orendi reports the archaeobotany of Hellenistic Artaxata, filling a gap she names at the outset: archaeobotanical work in Armenia has run for decades but Hellenistic assemblages are scarce. The material comes from the Armenian-German Artaxata Project's 2018–2022 excavations in the Lower City of the former Armenian capital. Though the charred seed and fruit assemblage is small, it supports inferences about both diet and the surrounding landscape. Cereals dominate, with naked wheat the most common species, and the weed flora points to an open landscape with wet habitats. She concludes that Hellenistic Armenian agriculture worked to minimise the risk of crop failure by cultivating a wide range of crops.

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  18. 2025

    The Zodiac Man in Armenian Tradition

    Sargsyan, Anush

    In the Armenian tradition the zodiac signs are tied to parts of the body and to geographical regions, a doctrine descending from Paul of Alexandria and from a work attributed to Anania Shirakatsi. Between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries these texts were absorbed into Armenian calendrical and astronomical compendia and their commentaries. Western Zodiac Man iconography was then taken into the Armenian tradition, where tomar manuscripts often present it as double-page compositions showing both the astrological and geographical dimensions. Sargsyan shows the zodiac signs in these diagrams generally follow Islamic iconographic models, since Armenian prognostic literature was heavily influenced by Islamic tradition, with independent European examples adopted later.

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  19. 2025

    Transforming Governance in Armenia: From Soviet Legacy to Strategic Reform

    Margaryan, Marina

    Margaryan analyses the evolution of institutional reform in Armenia's public administration since independence, dividing it into four stages: initial institutional creation (1991–1999), formalization and adoption of Western governance models (2000–2008), European integration and administrative modernization (2009–2017), and the political transformation with renewed reform since 2018. She reads these as the interaction of historical legacy, external influence and domestic aspirations toward modernization, assessing institutional inertia, the limited localization of imported models, and political resistance. She closes by measuring the reforms against Armenia's Public Administration Reform Strategy to 2030 and arguing for a shift from imitative reform to durable institutional transformation.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  20. 2025

    Yovasap' of Sebastia: From Adam to Noah and the Tower

    Blokland, Dina et al.

    Presents an annotated edition and English translation of a poem probably composed by Yovasap of Sebastia (c. 1510–after 1564). Part of a longer cycle of biblical retellings in verse, the poem narrates world history from Adam down to the Tower of Babel. Yovasap repeatedly departs from the biblical narrative to offer homiletic or typological elaborations and shows deep familiarity with parabiblical traditions. The authors present it as a fine specimen of the 'Armenian embroidered Bible,' attesting how biblical and parabiblical material was received and developed in the Armenian literary sphere.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  21. 2025

    Բառերի պատճառաբանվածության մթագնումը հայերենում (The Obscuring of Word Motivation in Armenian)

    Felekyan, Manuk

    Over the historical development of a language the semantic structure of a compound word can shift, blurring or destroying awareness of its compound structure: a process called demotivation (ապապատճառաբանում). The article explains that a compound word's meaning rests on its internal form, the motivated link between sound and sense, and that this internal form is usually transparent to speakers. Under certain conditions, however, Armenian tends to obscure both the derivational and the semantic ties inside a compound, sometimes losing the internal form entirely, as in many native Armenian root words. The study sets out the principal causes and the successive stages of this demotivation, noting that words at different stages of loss coexist side by side in the language.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access
  22. 2025

    «Համայնքը և հանրային մշակութային տարածքի փոխակերպումները հետխորհրդային Հայաստանում սահմանամերձ բնակավայրերի օրինակով» ծրագրի շուրջ

    Հայկուհի Մուրադյան et al.

    Հայաստանի սահմանամերձ բնակավայրերում, the project follows մշակույթի տներ, գյուղական ակումբներ, թանգարաններ, and արվեստի դպրոցներ as communities and state bodies remake post-Soviet public space.

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    2025Journal ArticleOpen Access

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