ARMANIAK/ARMANUM/ARMANI/

 

*Ar is the prime syllable mean in Armenian speach and writing. *Ar is the first in rank, in authority, or significance, in principal. *AR as prime has the highest quality or value like prime farmland is Ard in Armenian.

The earliest documentary evidence of the Armenians is a sixth century B.C. inscription in Behistun by the Persian king Darius I. It was nearly a thousand years, however, before the Armenians themselves began to put their language to writing, when in 406 or 407 A.D. a priest Maštʿocʿ (also known as Mesrop) developed an Armenian alphabet. One also finds reference to a prior alphabet created by the Syriac bishop Daniel, purportedly abandoned because it was ill-suited to the sound system of the language. The language whose records date back to this period is termed Classical Armenian. 

According to Greek mythic tradition, Armenia was named after Armenus, one of Jason's Argonauts. Armenium or Armenion was a town of Pelasgiotis in ancient Thessaly,  said to have been the birthplace of Armanus, who accompanied Jason to Asia, and gave his name to the country of Armenia. This arose some say from the accidental similarity of the names and some that there is no reason to doubt the records. Notice the Armenian prefix *Ar in this paragraph of nouns starting with the Argonauts who were a band of heroes in Greek mythology, who in the years before the Trojan War (around 1300 BC) accompanied Jason to Colchis (location adjacent to the Armenian plateau) in his quest to find the Golden Fleece. Their name comes from their ship, Argo, named after its builder, Argus. Argus'  the son of Arestor. The latter was a member of the Argive royal house sometimes called Minyans, after a prehistoric tribe in the area. The Golden fleece was dedicated to Aries and it symbolized nobility, royalty and true kingship. As the legend states, anyone who possessed the fleece would be considered a true ruler. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century B.C., states that the Armenians lived in Thrace and then moved into Phrygia, from which they crossed into the later Armenian territory. Strabo, writing in the first century B.C., states that the Armenians entered the territory from two directions, one group coming from Phrygia in the west, the other coming from Mesopotamia in the southeast. Although by neither account were they the original inhabitants of the region, Xenophon records in 400 B.C. that they seem to have absorbed most of the local dwellers.

Armenian tradition, recorded between the fifth and eighth centuries A.D., relates the Armenian people to the descendants of Noah. After the Flood, Noah's family settled in Armenia before moving south to Babylon in successive generations. One of Noah's descendants, Haik, revolted and returned to Armenia, pursued by the Babylonian Bel. Haik killed Bel and became ruler of the Armenian land, and the descendants of Haik later defended Armenia from the forces of Assyria.

Modern scholarly views are just as wide-ranging. A common view is that the Armenians were of Indo-European stock and entered the region either along with the Phrygians from the Balkan region or with the Mitanni from the area of the Aral Sea. They encountered the Urartuan culture in a period of decline and eventually came to rule over them and other Caucasian groups in the region. Another theory draws on linguistic similarities between the Armenian language and the Caucasian languages of the area to say that the Armenians had originally been themselves a Caucasian tribe which adopted an Indo-European tongue, and this Caucasian substrate is responsible for the fact that Armenian is rather genetically isolated among the Indo-European languages. Yet another theory is that the Armenians are the most sedentary members of the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European; that the Indo-European languages originated in the transcaucasian region, but the Armenians, who chose not to migrate out of the area, were marginalized during periods of Hittite and Urartuan dominance. Suffice it to say, the true origin of the Armenian peoples will remain shrouded in obscurity for some time to come.

The Armenian land itself is a plateau located roughly 5000 feet above sea level and hemmed in by mountainous regions. It lies roughly southeast of the Black Sea and southwest of the Caspian Sea. The ancient Armenian homeland was somewhat more expansive than the modern Armenian Republic, also including much of eastern Turkey, the northeastern corner of Iran, and parts of Azerbaijan and Georgia. In the northeast the Kur River separates the highland region from lowlands which sweep to the Caspian Sea. The northern border is continued by the Pontus mountain range, which extends west from the source of the Kur and shields Armenia from the Black Sea. The Taurus and Zagros mountain ranges create a natural boundary running along the entire southern expanse and cutting Armenia off from Mesopotamia. The Armenian plateau itself is divided by several smaller mountain ranges that furnish the sources for a number of unnavigable rivers. The northermost section of the Euphrates was to form the boundary between Greater and Lesser Armenia in the subsequent imperial struggles.