Armenia

Tōgarmāh, the “house of Togarmah,” is a northern nation of the Hebrew Bible, a grandson of Japheth through Gomer (Genesis 10:3) and, in Ezekiel, a far-northern people who trade horses, war-horses, and mules at the markets of Tyre and march in the army of Gog. The name is widely, though not certainly, identified with the Armenian highland: the Armenians themselves adopted the identification, naming Tʿorgom as the father of their patriarch Hayk and calling their land the “house of Tʿorgom.” The toponym most often compared is the Hittite and Assyrian Tegarama of the upper Euphrates, in the right region but not obviously the same word.

The entry is marked disputed because the equation rests on later tradition and geographic plausibility rather than on any biblical statement that Togarmah is Armenia. What the case illustrates is how thoroughly the Armenians later wove the biblical genealogies into their own origin story, claiming descent from Togarmah just as they claimed the resting-place of the ark on their mountains. Whether or not the prophet meant Armenia, the Armenians made the name theirs, an exonym adopted not from a conqueror’s chancellery but from the Table of Nations.

In the Babylonian column of Darius’s trilingual at Behistun, the province that the Old Persian text calls Armina is named Uraštu. This is not a new word but the old Assyrian and Babylonian name of the kingdom of Urartu, which had ruled the same Armenian highland until its fall two centuries earlier. The Persian chancellery, writing in classical Mesopotamian cuneiform for its Babylonian subjects, reached for the name those readers already knew for that country, even though the kingdom of Urartu was long gone and a new people and a new name had taken its place.

The equation is one of the most instructive moments in the whole transmission of the name. It shows two naming traditions meeting on a single rock: the Iranian Armina, which would become the world’s word for the land, and the Mesopotamian Urarṭu, which the Bible would carry forward as Ararat. For the duration of one inscription they denote exactly the same province, the new name and the old, and the Babylonian scribe’s choice records the simple geographic truth that Achaemenid Armenia occupied the ground of fallen Urartu.

The Elamite rendering of Armenia in the Achaemenid inscriptions, Harminuya, written har-mi-nu-ia: the third voice of the trilingual chancellery, transcribing the Old Persian Armina with the prothetic h- that Elamite orthography favored before initial vowels. The form stands in the Elamite version of Bisitun through the long narrative of Darius’s Armenian campaigns, five battles in a single rebel year, and in the land-lists of the later monuments.

Its interest on this page is the company it keeps, for the three chancelleries did not translate each other. Old Persian wrote the new Iranian name Armina; Elamite dutifully transcribed that Persian word; but the Babylonian column, as this page’s Akkadian entry records, ignored the new name entirely and wrote the old Uraštu, Urartu, the dead kingdom whose land this was. The trilingual thus preserves a disagreement inside a single monument: two scripts calling the province by its future name, one by its past, carved side by side on the same rock. Harminuya is the middle witness, a Persian word in Elamite dress, marking the exact generation in which Armenia’s name changed hands.

Armina is the oldest securely dated form of the name Armenia, carved into the Behistun inscription of Darius I around 520 BCE, where Armenia appears both among the lands the king rules and among the provinces that rebelled in the first year of his reign. Darius records sending his general Dādṛšiš and fighting several battles “in Armina” before the province was subdued. The form recurs in the later lists of subject peoples at Persepolis and Naqš-e Rustam, fixing Armina as the Achaemenid administrative name of the highland satrapy.

This is the headwater of the exonym by which the whole world outside Armenia has known the country ever since. The name’s origin before Behistun is obscure, with no certain connection to the Armenians’ own self-designation; what is clear is that it is the Old Persian form that travels, into Greek as Armenía and onward through Latin. In the trilingual itself the name is given three faces: beside this Old Persian Armina stand the Elamite Harminuya and, in the Babylonian column, the older highland name Uraštu, the Persian chancellery binding its new province to the kingdom of Urartu it had replaced.

Armenía is the Greek name of the country and Arménioi its people, taken over from the Achaemenid Armina and first appearing in Herodotus, who counts the Armenians among the satrapies of Darius and notes their kinship with the Phrygians. The fullest early Greek picture of the land comes from Xenophon, who marched the Ten Thousand across its snowbound plateau in 401 BCE and described its villages, its underground houses, and its barley-beer in the Anabasis. By the Hellenistic period Armenía was the standard Greek designation, applied to the kingdoms of Greater and Lesser Armenia on either side of the Euphrates.

The Greek form is the pivot through which the Persian exonym became the European one. The Greeks took the name from the Achaemenid administrative world they knew, rendered the Iranian Armina with the familiar place-name ending -ía, and passed it on to Latin essentially unchanged. The Armenians’ own name for themselves, Hay, never entered this western stream; from Herodotus onward the Greeks called them by the name their Persian overlords used, and so, through Greek, has everyone else.

Armenia is the Latin name, taken from the Greek Armenía and used throughout Roman geography, history, and statecraft. Armenia was a perennial concern of Rome, the contested buffer kingdom between the empire and Parthia, and Tacitus famously summed up its position as a people “ambiguous” by temperament and situation, set between two great powers. The name fills the Roman record of the eastern wars, from Pompey and Mark Antony to the long Julio-Claudian struggle over who would crown the Armenian king.

Through Latin the name reached its permanent form, the Armenia shared without change by the modern European languages. The route is the familiar one: an Iranian name first cut at Behistun, rendered into Greek, and fixed in Latin without further change. The endonym Haykʿ remained sealed within the Armenian world throughout, so that the country entered Western consciousness, as it has stayed, under the name its first imperial masters gave it.

The Middle Persian name of Armenia, written ʾlmny in the great trilingual inscription of Šābuhr I at the Kaʿba-ye Zardušt, c. 262 CE, where Armin stands in the king’s list of the lands of Ērānšahr and the king’s own son Ohrmazd-Ardašir bears the title of great king of Armenia. The form continues Old Persian Armina directly, the same name in the same imperial register, and it remained the Sasanian administrative name through the marzpanate that governed eastern Armenia until the Arab conquests.

The entry closes a circle the page opened at Behistun. Darius carved Armina into his rock in the sixth century BCE; seven and a half centuries later a second Persian empire carved the same name into a different rock, twenty kilometers away, for the same country. Between the two inscriptions Armenia had been Achaemenid, Macedonian, Artaxiad, Roman, and Arsacid, and the Persian chancellery name had waited out all of it essentially unchanged. Empires filed Armenia under the same word for eight hundred years, which is perhaps the strongest claim to permanence a name in this atlas can make: not that a people kept it, but that rival bureaucracies could not improve on it.

The Parthian form of Armenia’s name, from the Parthian version of Šābuhr I’s trilingual inscription at the Kaʿba-ye Zardušt, c. 262 CE, written ʾrmny where the Middle Persian column writes ʾlmny. The early Sasanian kings published their res gestae in Middle Persian, Parthian, and Greek, the three chancellery languages of the empire they had taken from the Arsacids, and Armenia appears in all three columns of the province list.

The trilingual habit is itself the observation. This page already holds Armenia in the three parallel scripts of the Achaemenid chancellery, Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian; the ŠKZ shows the successor empire doing exactly the same thing with a new set of three, and Armenia sitting in both trilinguals a full millennium apart. Parthian was months from extinction as a chancellery language when this was carved, kept on the wall mostly to honor the dynasty the Sasanians had displaced. The name is ordinary; the column it stands in is a monument to the last generation in which anyone would write it.

Haykʿ is the Armenians’ own name for their nation and land, the plural of Hay, “an Armenian,” attested from the beginnings of Armenian literature in the fifth century CE. The land is Haykʿ or, in the locative that became the standard country-name, Hayastan; the people are Haykʿ; the language is Hayerēn. The fifth-century historian Movsēs Xorenacʿi derives the name from the eponymous patriarch Hayk, the giant archer who, in the national legend, slays the Babylonian tyrant Bēl and founds the Armenian people at the foot of the mountains. Whatever the true etymology, the self-designation is independent of and far older in feeling than the literary record that first preserves it.

This is the single entry on the page that is genuinely Armenia’s own name for itself, and it stands entirely apart from the Armina tradition that gave every other language its word. The Armenians never called themselves Armenians; the world has never called them Hay. The gap is among the sharpest endonym-exonym splits in the project, and it is no accident that the self-name surfaces in writing only with Mesrop Maštocʿ’s alphabet of around 405 CE, the moment Armenian could record its own voice rather than be named by its neighbors. Armenians are hay and the country Hayastan to this day; the eponym’s name has never once left its people’s mouths.

The Classical Arabic name for Armenia, in use from the conquests of the 640s onward and fixed as the name of a province of the caliphate governed from Dabīl, the city the Armenians called Dvin. Al-Balādhurī’s ninth-century Futūḥ al-Buldān devotes a chapter to the conquest of Armīniya and records the terms under which the country entered Arab rule; Yāqūt’s geographic dictionary treats it at length, subdividing the province in the administrative manner of the geographers. The form most likely reached Arabic through Greek and Syriac usage, and carries the Arabic feminine ending on the same Armina stem attested a millennium earlier at Behistun.

The entry’s significance lies in the company it keeps. Old Persian Armina, Greek Armenía, Latin Armenia, and Arabic Armīniya are four successive empires filing the same name for the same highland, each administering a country whose own people called it Haykʿ the entire time. No other entry on this page shows the exonym’s institutional momentum so plainly: the caliphate inherited the name the way it inherited the roads. A name can pass from empire to empire like a provincial seal, and the people it describes may never once use it.

The Byzantine theme of the Armeniakón, one of the empire’s original great military districts, attested from the 660s, its name an adjective formed on the Greek Armenía of the entry above: the command “facing Armenia,” of the army once stationed against the Armenian frontier. The theme itself lay not in Armenia but across northeastern Anatolia and the Pontos, and it dissolved in the disasters after Manzikert, when the frontier it was named for ceased to exist.

On a page anchored by the exonym family of Armina, the entry shows the name doing something none of its siblings do: naming not the country but the direction of the country, an administrative label built from a neighbor’s bearing rather than a people’s home. Together with the Anatolikon, “the Eastern,” and the theme of Macedonia that sat in Thrace, it belongs to the Byzantine habit of letting army names harden into geography; soldiers of the Army of Armenia settled into a province that then was, itself, the Armeniakon, Armenia as a compass-point on maps that Armenia itself never entered. Every other name on this page points at the highland; this one points from it, Armenia as seen over the shoulder of the empire next door.