The first Christian state also invented its own alphabet in 405 AD
Armenians call themselves Hay, a name tradition traces to a legendary patriarch who founded the nation near Ararat. Their kingdom became the first to make Christianity a state religion, probably in 301 CE, and a century later the monk Mesrop Mashtots created the alphabet Armenians still write with today.
Armenians are native to the Armenian Highlands of West Asia. Outsiders' names for them appear by the 6th century BC: the Persian king Darius I's Behistun Inscription of 517 BC calls the land Armina, and Greek writers soon used Armenios. Around 401 BC the Greek general Xenophon described Armenian village life and hospitality. The medieval historian Movses Khorenatsi derived the word Armenian from Aram, a descendant of Hayk, while modern scholars also link Hay to the Bronze Age state of Hayasa-Azzi or to Indo-European roots meaning lord or metal.
Armenian is an Indo-European language, but its family tree is contested. Many scholars grouped it with Greek, and Eric P. Hamp placed it in a Graeco-Armenian branch in 2012. Herodotus called the Armenians Phrygian colonists, a theory now discredited, and Kim argued in 2018 that the shared features with Greek probably come from contact rather than common descent. Two spoken standards exist today, Eastern and Western, which remain mutually intelligible.
Genetic studies describe several mixings of Eurasian populations between 3000 and 2000 BCE, then little new mixture after about 1200 BCE, when Bronze Age civilisations around the eastern Mediterranean collapsed. A controversial proposal by Thomas Gamkrelidze and Vyacheslav Ivanov puts the Indo-European homeland itself in the Armenian Highland, and some genetic work, including David Reich's team in 2018, has partly supported it. Kingdoms such as Hayasa-Azzi, the Nairi confederation and Urartu, which held the highlands from 860 to 590 BCE, all fed into Armenian ethnogenesis.
The first entity actually called Armenia was a Persian province under the Orontid dynasty in the late 6th century BCE. At its peak, from 95 to 65 BCE under Tigran the Great, the kingdom stretched from the Caucasus into what is now central Turkey, Lebanon and northern Iran. Tradition credits the apostles Thaddeus and Bartholomew with bringing Christianity. After the Arsacid kings adopted it, pilgrims founded what became the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem. Armenian illuminators kept that faith visible: a gospel book of 1311 by T'oros the Deacon survives in New York.
Source: Armenians
