Period of Legend
The Armenians have their full share of legends regarding
their origin; legends in which spirits, gods and superhuman heroes, the forces
and phenomena of nature, play dominant parts. In such myths may be traced
occasional historical facts. The impossible thing is to disentangle the fact
from the fiction. The most pervasive figure in this national folklore which has
come down to us through songs and ballads is that of Haik.
The Hero-Ancestor
Haik, the wonderful archer, long ago became established in
the national legend as the ancestor of the Armenians, bequeathing to them the
patronymic Hay, the name which the Armenians apply
to themselves. This legend takes us back to that prehistoric epoch when the
first Armenians arrived in the land of Urartu, under the leadership of a great
commander. Haik, according to the story, revolted against a tyrant, Bel of
Babylon, and departed for the North with his family and followers. Bel, at the
head of a large army, pursued and came upon him. Haik engaged Bel in battle,
killed him with an arrow, dispersed his rabble of warriors and freed the land
which is known as Hark
— i.e., the country of the Hai people.
The names of the places mentioned in the myths — Hark,
Haikashen, Hayotz-tzor, are found around the Lake of Van, the region where the
Armenians settled. Haik, the nahapet (tribal
chief), whose household included 300 men, waged his successful battle in the
"land of Ararat." After his victory over Bel, the chieftain proceeded towards the northwest, whose inhabitants
voluntarily submitted to his authority.
This legend is reminiscent of the invasion of the Armenians
from the west. The bringing of Haik from the south in the narrative may be
traced to the wish of the Christian historians of Armenia — Khorenatsi and
others — to connect the story of Haik and Bel with the Biblical narrative of the
construction of the Tower of Babel.
An historical character?
Father S. Der Movsessian believes that Haik was "an
historical person." He was later deified and worshipped as "Deus
Armenicus," the man who led a Hittite colony into Armenia in 580 B.C.
and vanquished the last Urartean king, Menuas II, whom tradition has transformed
into the tyrant Bel. Gradually the name Haik,
derived from Hay, became an adjective or adverb,
synonymous with heroic valor, prowess and beauty. This view has been endorsed by
another savant, Father S. Matikian, a Mekhitarist of Vienna, who connects
Haik with Hai or
Hay, the old name of the Armenian people, and
offers in support of his argument the names of Assyria, Athens and Rome, each
named in honor of its particular deity-hero. Haik, says he, that titan of
popular legend, was one of the greatest of gods, equal to the Indra of India,
the Assur of Assyria, the Hattu of the Hittites and the Khaldi of the
Khaldian-Urarteans. The Haik of Khorenatsi reminds us of Marduk, mentioned in
the Bible, a Babylonian divinity (represented in our skies by the planet
Mercury) whose arrow slew Bel because of his rebellion against the gods. In a
similar manner, the dragon Verethra had been destroyed by Indra, the enemies of
Athens by Athene, and the enemies of Germany by Odin. Just as Haik fled from
Babylon because of Bel, whom he eventually killed, so Zeus had escaped to the
mountains of the Caucasus, later to return to Sicily and hurl fatal arrows into
the bodies of his titanic foes.
Haik linked with Orion
Ancient legendary heroes and demigods were often, in popular
imagination, transfigured into stars — as in the case of Marduk and Mercury — so
that the people would have nightly evidence of their celestial existence. In the
old popular sense, Haik means a giant, and in some manner he became connected
with the Orion of Greek legend — perhaps because Orion, too, was a hero of fine
stature and features. The latter was
accidentally slain by Diana, who was in love with him, and in her remorse she
turned him into a brilliant constellation. Other mythological cults saw Orion as
the god of the wind and storm; the "thunderous Orion" of the Babylonian
conception drove away evil spirits. And so it came to pass that this
constellation mentioned twice in the Bible (Job IX, 9;
XXXVIII, 31) and called Orion in the Greek text, was,
in the Armenian translation, turned into Haik.
The linguistic relation between the names of
Haik and Hai or
Hay is not entirely clear. The prototype of
Hay or Khay has been
traced by some scholars to the name of the great god Khaldi. Father L. Alishan
believes that the name Hay was derived from Haik,
and that the national patronymic was originally Ha.
Ha‑os was the name under which the nation was
mentioned by the Georgian historians, the ending os
being a Greek usage. The appellation Ha still
existed in certain Armenian localities until 1915; also in the plural form
Haik or Hek,
Khaik or Khek, as in
Khekotz-Vank, the monastery of the Armenians.
Tel-el‑Amarna tablets
All the above conjectures concerning the name
Hai or Hay were
supplemented by discoveries during excavations in Tel-el‑Amarna, Egypt, in 1887.
There 350 clay tablets were found, the archives of the Pharaohs Amenophis III
and Amenophis IV (1350‑1335 B.C.). The deciphering of
these led to the discovery of Hattushash, the capital of the forgotten Hittite
empire, at the site of the modern Turkish village of Boghaz-Keuy, near Yozgat,
Asia Minor. The cuneiform inscriptions on the Hattushash tablets, deciphered
in 1925 by Hugo Winckler and Bedrick Hrozny, disclosed a hitherto unknown state,
Hayasa, located in what came to be known as Armenia, northeast of the Hittite
empire. "The similarity of the words Hayasa and
Hayastan," says Prof. A. Hatch, "is so obvious that
I am tempted to declare that the oldest name of Armenia has already been
discovered." The form Haystan, however, is of a
later date, formed from Hay and
Stan. The Persian suffix stan
— sthana in Sanskrit — indicates "the place, the
home."
Origin of the name "Hay"
The etymology of the word Hay
still remains a controversial problem. Some authorities derive it from
Pet, of an Indo-European language root, meaning
ruler. It is said that the Armens who invaded
Armenia were called by the subjugated natives Pet.
Strange as it may seem, comparative philology has certain formulae of linguistic
evolution which make it possible for Pet to become
in the course of ages, Hay. For the word
peter or pater
(father) the Armenian has hayr (pronounced hire),
while the word for mother is mayr (pronounced
mire).
But other scholars find the origin of
Hay in Khald or Hald,
the name of the national god Khaldis, worshipped by the early inhabitants of
Armenia. Kh here is pronounced like the guttural
Χ of the Greek alphabet or the German
ch. The ancient Urartean Empire, of which the city
of Van was the capital, is known to some scholars also as the Vannic, but more
generally as the Khaldean or Haldian empire. By a process of phonetic evolution,
Khald becomes Khayd,
and then sloughing off the final d, we have
Khay. In fact, places still in existence around the
Lake of Van were, before the Armenian deportation in the First World-War, called
Khaik or Khek, meaning Armenians. In many districts, villages spoke of
themselves as Khay, and still thought of the country as Khayastan.
There are yet other theories. P. Jensen, who claimed that the
Armenians are the descendants of the Hittites, derived Hay
from Hatio-Hatti, another word for Hittite. Father Joseph Sandalgian found in
the Vannic inscriptions the word Uas or
Huas, the name of the god of wind, whose
worshippers were called Huas, a name which, he
believed, was gradually metamorphosed into Hay.
Armenia as a Median ally
Cyaxares, King of Media, aided by Babylonia, destroyed the
Assyrian kingdom in 605 B.C. and captured its western
refuge, Carchemish on the Euphrates. Nineveh, its capital, had already been
razed. The Medians put an end, likewise, to the Urartean kingdom, and advancing
further west, by 590 were attempting the domination of Asia Minor. The battle,
waged between the Medes and the Lydians on the banks of the Halys River on
May 28th, 585, was interrupted by a solar eclipse, and peace was concluded,
fixing the river as the frontier between the two empires. Media was then a
confederation of states, each one maintaining its own religion, language and laws. By that time, Armens had settled in
Armenia, living in neighborly relations with Khaldean-Urarteans and as subjects
and allies of the Median kingdom; so states Xenophon in his Cyropedia.
In 550 B.C., Cyrus (Kuros) the
Persian monarch, waged war on Astyages (Azhdahag) of Media, and seized his
power. The Medes thereupon entered into alliance with the Persians, with the
state of Armenia as another member of the federation. The Armenian king, who had
two sons, Tigran and Sabaris (Shavarsh), had
been defeated by Astyages and compelled to pay annual tribute. The Armenian army
was then composed of 40,000 infantrymen and 8,000 cavalry. The king's assets
were some 3,000 talents, or about $30,000,000.
Upon the outbreak of hostilities between Media and Babylonia he had renounced
his treaty obligations to the Medes. Cyrus, then commander of the army of
Cyaxares, captured the Armenian king and his family, but soon released them
through the intercession of Tigran, the king's son, who was a friend and hunting
companion of Cyrus.
It may be adduced from Xenophon's story that the Armens who
had crossed the Euphrates in the early sixth century B.C.
accepted the Median king as their suzerain, in addition to their own chief, whom
Xenophon also calls "king" (Basileus). The Armens who
occupied and cultivated the plains of their new home, also needed grazing lands
for their cattle, and for that reason continued their feud with the Khalds, the
inhabitants of the mountain-sides. This friction, which had facilitated the
Median predominance in the country, came to an end by reason of the
reconciliation — and eventual intermixture of the two main elements — the
incoming Armens and the older stock, the Urarteans.
Early Armen kingdom
A folklore poem dealing with Tigran Erouandian, contemporary
of Astyages and Cyrus, has caused Khorenatsi to confuse the Tigran of the sixth
century B.C. with the Tigran the Great of the first
century B.C. However, Xenophon's account, evidently
based upon popular songs and stories, confirms the existence of an Armen kingdom
immediately after the fall of the Urartean. Savaris (Shavarsh), Vahagn, Nerseh,
Zareh, etc., the successors of Tigran Erouandian, were Armens by race, despite
their Median or Persian names. The adoption of Iranian names and customs was the
result of intimate relations established between the two peoples. Witness Khorenatsi's narrative of the marriage of
Tigran's sister Tigranuhi with Astyages, King of the Medes, whom Tigran was
finally forced to slay in battle.
Achaemenid-Persian rule
Armenia had become a dependency of Persia after the fall of
the Median empire in 550 B.C. The Armenian
contingents, cavalry and infantry, had taken part in Cyrus's conquest of Lydia
in 546 and of Babylonia in 539. A rebellion of ten subject nations — one of them
Armenia — broke out against Persia during the reign of Darius I (522‑486). The
Armenians were compelled to acknowledge defeat after five battles, one of them
fought on Assyrian territory. "Arakha, an Armen, the son of Haldita," pretender
to the throne of Babylonia, was also defeated and executed. Armenia became
thereafter the thirteenth of the twenty provinces of the Empire, ruled by
satraps — "khshatrapa" in Persian. Native grandees,
however, were permitted to exercise a certain measure of authority under the
satraps.
The forced union accomplished among the powerful states of
the East — Assyria, Babylonia, Lydia and Egypt — contributed greatly towards the
known world's commercial and financial development. Land and sea communication
with India was established during the Achaemenid period. Darius I reopened the
canal connecting the River Nile with the Red Sea, which had been dug during the
period of the Pharaohs. Darius I also introduced an improved monetary system,
and safer and quicker means of travel and transportation. In conjunction with
several peoples of the Euxine Sea coast, the Armenian satrapy paid to the
Imperial treasury 400 talents, equivalent to $400,000.
Armenia also supplied the King's stable with 20,000 foals for every annual
festival of Mithra. Armenian military forces had been joining the Persian army
from the earliest times. Those who served under Xerxes in the invasion of Greece
in 480 B.C., says Herodotus, "were armed like the
Phrygians, and together with these, they were commanded by Artomex II,
son-in‑law of Darius." Their weapons and equipment were all alike. At that time
the Armens had occupied only southwestern parts of Armenia, while the Saspeirs
and the Urarteans or Alarodians lived in the plains of Ararat. The Persian
"royal" highway, connecting Sardice (Lydia) and Susa (Persia) passed across the
modern Malatia-Harpout-Diarbekir-Jezireh areas.
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