The name Hayastan, as commonly believed, appeared in the 6th century BCE. The state that existed in the same place before was called the Kingdom of Van or Urartu. Why do Armenians want to be deprived of their indigenous rights in the Armenian Highlands?
After the collapse of the Kingdom of Van, known as Urartu, it disappeared, and almost immediately in its place emerged the familiar Hayastan, which has been called by that name for at least two and a half thousand years.
Furthermore, to the north of Mesopotamia, in the 3rd millennium BCE, there was a state called Aratta among the Sumerians. It is noteworthy that in the Septuagint translation of the book of the prophet Jeremiah, the kingdom of Ararat, i.e., Armenia, is mentioned specifically as the “kingdom of Arate.” Not only does Aratta clearly resemble Ararat, but there are ancient sources that explicitly provide the name. An even more interesting story is associated with the name Hayasa. It was not discovered through archaeological excavations but through the translation of the Hittite Empire’s library.
In 1905, in central Turkey, 150 km from modern Ankara, the German orientalist-assyriologist Hugo Winckler (1863-1913) discovered a large number of tablets in the modern village of Bogazkoy, the site of the former Hattusa, the capital of the Hittite Empire (the self-designation of the country was Hatti). The tablets were written in Akkadian cuneiform, already known to European scholars, but they were in an unknown language. Here is an important point: researchers could easily read the Hittite script, but they completely did not understand their ancient and long-extinct language.
The decoding of the Hittite language was undertaken from 1915 by Bedřich Hrozný, a young Czech assyriologist who later became well-known. Hrozný transcribed the cuneiform text into Latin script and hypothesized that the Hittite language was an Indo-European language. And he was right. He began translating by analogy with words from other Indo-European languages. When a certain word resembled something in known languages, its meaning was established based on that resemblance. Soon, Hrozný was able to read the rich royal archives of the Hittite capital.
These documents mentioned that during the Hittite Kingdom (around 1800-1180 BCE), there existed a state called Hayasa in the territory of the Armenian Highlands. It thrived for a millennium before Urartu.
Hayasa or Hayasa-Azzi (Hayasa-Atti) was mentioned in Hittite cuneiform texts from the 16th to 13th centuries BCE.
During this period, Hayasa sometimes made peace with the Hittite Kingdom and paid tribute, formed alliances, and even provided troops, but at times engaged in military conflicts with them. For example, Anniyas or Ananiah, the king of Hayasa in the 1340s-1310s BCE, waged fierce wars against the Hittites and inflicted defeat after defeat upon them. Most Hittitologists place Hayasa in the headwaters of the Chorokh and Euphrates rivers, within the territory of the Armenian Highlands. However, its eastern boundaries are not precisely known. Naturally, the Hittites wrote about events on the western borders of Hayasa, as that was where it bordered the Hittite Empire. They were less interested in the affairs of their neighbors in the eastern and distant regions.
Historians believe that the capital of Hayasa was the city of Kummaḫa (later Armenian Kemah), located in the headwaters of the Euphrates River, near the modern city of Erzincan (Armenian Erznka). It is worth noting that this is a quite unique situation where the Hittites actually used the name of the country that, apparently, the inhabitants themselves used. In other words, the Hittites did not adopt foreign names or exonyms but used the self-designation or endoethnonym of their own neighbors. This is rare since exonyms and ethnonyms of countries usually differ, as in the cases of Deutschland and Germany, Greece and Hellas, Japan and Nippon, and so on.
However, a paradoxical situation arises here. It turns out that before the emergence of the Urartu kingdom, there was an older state in the same location called Hayasa, frequently mentioned by the Hittites. But one does not need to be Armenian to know that the modern and ancient name of the country for the Armenians themselves is Hayastan or Aystan, used since the disappearance of Urartu, i.e., from the 6th century BCE. As they say, feel the difference: first, in the mid-2nd millennium BCE, Hayasa, then Urartu, and after the collapse of Urartu, Hayastan. Any objective historian, knowing the name by which modern Armenians refer to their country, will notice the obvious similarity with the name from Hittite archives.
Therefore, it is quite natural that in the first half of the 20th century, some European researchers speculated that the root “haya” (hayа) in the word “Hayasa” corresponded to the self-designation of Armenians, “hay,” and that the suffix “(a)sa” was a Hittite suffix meaning “land” or “country.” This theory was first formulated by Swiss Assyriologist and the first Hittitologist, Emil Gustav Forrer. It was further developed by German philologist Paul Kretschmer. In 1933, the Austrian Academy of Sciences published Kretschmer’s work “Der nationale Name der Armenier Haik” (“The National Name of the Armenians Haik”), where he concluded that the name “Hayasa” mentioned in the Bogazköy inscriptions meant “Armenia.” Later, this viewpoint was supported by Nikolay Adonts, Grigor Kapantsyan, Rafael Ishkhanyan, and other historians in Armenia. Gevorg Jaugayan wrote about this: “The primary language of Hayasa was Armenian, and the Armenian element played a dominant role in the Hayasan state.” It seemed logical and understandable to everyone.
However, in the second half of the 20th century, a strange struggle began among historians where attempts were made, under the guise of scientific discussion, to detach Hayasa from Armenian history and consequently deprive Armenians of their past. Even during the late Soviet period, prominent Soviet scholars participated in this dispute. In the early 1980s, Igor Mikhailovich Diakonov, a renowned historian, orientalist, and linguist, suggested that the self-designation of Armenians in Classical Armenian (grabar), Հայք (hay-kʿ), likely derived from the Urartian name for the city of Melitene, Urartian Ḫāti. In response to this, Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov, a famous linguist and academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, co-author of the Gamkrelidze-Ivanov hypothesis (Armenian hypothesis of the Proto-Indo-European language origin), stated the erroneous nature of all of I.M. Diakonov’s constructions regarding the origin of the ethnonym “hay” and other questions of Armenian ethnogenesis, and supported the correctness of G.A. Kapantsyan’s conclusions.
Diakonov was a proponent of the view that the ancestors of Armenians migrated to the Armenian Highlands from the west, from the European homeland. In 1968, he published his research on the ethnogenesis of Armenians titled “Proiskhozhdeniye armyanskogo naroda” (“The Origins of the Armenian People”), where he argued for a migration-mixed hypothesis of Armenian ethnogenesis. Vyacheslav Ivanov, who, together with Tamaz Gamkrelidze, put forward the hypothesis of the Proto-Indo-European language origin, rejected I.M. Diakonov’s assumptions on several questions of Armenian ethnogenesis as erroneous.
Modern researchers assert that I.M. Diakonov’s hypothesis on the proximity of Greek and Phrygian to Thracian and Armenian, proposed in the 1960s, has not found confirmation in science. It must be said to the credit of Diakonov himself that by the end of his life, he acknowledged the erroneous nature of these views and expressed his opinion on the localization of the Proto-Indo-European homeland around 6000 BCE in Anatolia, from where they migrated to the Balkan-Danube region. In other words, he came to the conclusion that the movement of ancient peoples was in the completely opposite direction, not from west to east, but from east to west. However, even today, there are still Western historians who continue to defend similar views that have already been rejected by many scholars and deemed unsubstantiated. Debates continue over the location of Aratta, as well as the ethnic composition of Hayasa and Urartu and their role in the origin of Armenians.
According to contemporary historian Armen Ayvazyan, the denial of the connection between Armenians and Hayasa is politically motivated and aims to deprive Armenians of their right to indigenous status in the Armenian Highlands.
It is widely known who stands behind such denial and who benefits from it. However, another question is of interest: how much longer will this struggle continue, and when will representatives of science stop arguing about the obvious? Nevertheless, as Armenians humorously paraphrased the famous aphorism of the Roman historian Livy, “The truth may be obscured at times, but it never extinguishes.” So, no matter the struggle, the truth will survive and prevail.
Modern researchers assert that I.M. Diakonov’s hypothesis on the proximity of Greek and Phrygian to Thracian and Armenian, proposed in the 1960s, has not found confirmation in science. It must be said to the credit of Diakonov himself that by the end of his life, he acknowledged the erroneous nature of these views and expressed his opinion on the localization of the Proto-Indo-European homeland around 6000 BCE in Anatolia, from where they migrated to the Balkan-Danube region. In other words, he came to the conclusion that the movement of ancient peoples was in the completely opposite direction, not from west to east, but from east to west. However, even today, there are still Western historians who continue to defend similar views that have already been rejected by many scholars and deemed unsubstantiated. Debates continue over the location of Aratta, as well as the ethnic composition of Hayasa and Urartu and their role in the origin of Armenians.
According to contemporary historian Armen Ayvazyan, the denial of the connection between Armenians and Hayasa is politically motivated and aims to deprive Armenians of their right to indigenous status in the Armenian Highlands.
It is widely known who stands behind such denial and who benefits from it. However, another question is of interest: how much longer will this struggle continue, and when will representatives of science stop arguing about the obvious? Nevertheless, as Armenians humorously paraphrased the famous aphorism of the Roman historian Livy, “The truth may be obscured at times, but it never extinguishes.” So, no matter the struggle, the truth will survive and prevail.
by Armen Petrosyan
Translated by Vigen Avetisyan
