Tucked away in the greenery of the 2nd block of Yerevan’s Nor Nork district, in Tigran Mets Park, stands an unassuming cluster of dark volcanic boulders. Most passers-by see rocks; few realize they are looking at one of Armenia’s oldest surviving art forms — carved fragments of the famous Ughtasar petroglyphs, transported here from the highlands of Syunik more than half a century ago.
The original petroglyphs lie roughly 3,300 meters above sea level, on the slopes of Mount Ughtasar near the town of Sisian, around a small volcanic crater lake. There, more than 2,000 decorated basalt fragments are scattered across the mountainside, carved onto the dark brownish-black stone left behind by an extinct volcano. Scholars generally date the bulk of the carvings to the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age, with the greatest concentration and variety belonging to the 2nd millennium BCE and the early Iron Age, though some researchers argue certain motifs may reach back to the Paleolithic.
During the Soviet period, several of these carved fragments were removed from Ughtasar for scientific study and public exhibition and brought down to the capital. A number of them were placed in Tigran Mets Park in the Nor Nork district, where they remain on open, informal display today — without fencing, signage, or the interpretive infrastructure one might expect for artifacts of such age. For most of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the primary scholarly and touristic attention has remained fixed on the mountain site itself, long considered one of Armenia’s least accessible attractions due to its remote location and short accessible season.
The imagery on the Ughtasar boulders forms a consistent visual vocabulary repeated across thousands of individual compositions. The rock carvings depict scenes of daily and ritual life: group and solitary hunting scenes, herding activity, and an extensive bestiary that includes goats, mouflons, deer, wild boar, aurochs, wolves, and occasionally bear and lion figures. Goats and goat-like animals dominate the compositions by a wide margin — so much so that the carvings became known in Armenian tradition as “itsagir” (իծագիր), literally “goat-writing” or “goat-letters,” a term still used for the Nor Nork fragments today.
The carving technique itself is remarkably fine for its age: the lines are pecked or incised into the rock to a depth of only 2–6 millimeters and a width of 2–21 millimeters, producing silhouette-style figures that read clearly against the dark, weathered stone surface. On the boulder now standing in Tigran Mets Park, visitors can make out the outlines of horned animals and human-associated markings characteristic of this tradition, softened but not erased by decades of exposure to the Yerevan climate.
Some Armenian researchers, most notably Hamlet Martirosyan, have gone further, proposing that the recurring goat imagery functioned not merely as illustration but as a proto-writing system — arguing that in early Armenian, the words for “goat” and “to inscribe/arrange” were phonetically close, so that a goat figure could stand in for the abstract concept of writing itself. This “goat-writing” hypothesis remains outside mainstream academic consensus and is treated by most specialists as an intriguing but unproven interpretive framework rather than an established reading of the symbols; it is presented here as part of the site’s popular historiography rather than settled fact.
Precise dating of the Ughtasar carvings is genuinely difficult, since no organic material survives at the site to allow radiocarbon analysis, and the dating therefore rests on stylistic comparison and archaeological context rather than direct physical testing. Estimates in circulation range widely — from a cautious Chalcolithic/Bronze Age framework (roughly the 4th–2nd millennia BCE) to far earlier Paleolithic attributions for some of the oldest-looking compositions. The fragments relocated to Tigran Mets Park are conventionally labeled to the 2nd millennium BCE, situating them within the Middle-to-Late Bronze Age horizon that produced much of the surrounding highland’s rock art, cyclopean architecture, and burial fields.
The wider Ughtasar-Jermajur rock-art zone was not systematically studied until the 1960s, and archaeologists continue to catalogue new panels; the full corpus of documented carvings across Syunik is still being published in stages, decades after fieldwork began.
The Soviet-era practice of removing selected petroglyph blocks from Ughtasar reflected both a genuine scientific interest in the site and the era’s broader approach to relocating archaeological material for museum and educational display rather than preserving it strictly in situ. The result is a somewhat scattered legacy: a handful of carved boulders sit in an ordinary city park in Nor Nork, disconnected from the landscape, ritual geography, and lake-side context that originally gave them meaning, while the vast majority of the corpus remains on the mountain itself — increasingly difficult to visit in recent years, as the area has at times fallen close to the closed border zone with Azerbaijan following the 2020 war.
For Yerevan residents, the Tigran Mets Park stones offer a rare, low-barrier opportunity to see genuine Bronze Age rock art without the demanding 4×4 ascent to 3,300 meters that a visit to Ughtasar itself requires. At the same time, their presence in the park — unlabeled and largely unrecognized by the general public — illustrates a recurring theme in Armenian heritage management: significant artifacts preserved through relocation, yet left without the contextual framing needed for them to be understood by those who walk past them every day.
Sources: Wikipedia — Ughtasar Petroglyphs; Armeniapedia — Ughtasar Petroglyphs; Armenian Youth Federation West — Ughtasar: The Petroglyphs of Armenia; Hatis.am — Petroglyphs of Ughtasar
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