Hayastan remembers Hayk while maps say Armenia
Landlocked in the Armenian highlands of the South Caucasus, the Republic of Armenia borders Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Iran, with Yerevan as capital. Urartu formed by 860 BC; Proto-Armenian was present by at least 600 BC. Native Hayastan adds Persian -stan to Hayk, the patriarchal namesake.
Stone Age toolmakers worked near the obsidian outcrops more than a million years ago, and thousands of 325,000-year-old artifacts from Nor Geghi 1 in the Hrazdan valley hint that advanced techniques arose in several places rather than spreading from Africa alone. The Areni-1 cave, surveyed in 2010 and 2011, produced the oldest known leather shoe, a skirt and the earliest known winery. Yerevan itself traces its founding to the summer of 782 BC, when the Urartian king Argishti I carved an inscription recording it.
The outside world's word for the country appears as Armina on the Behistun Inscription of 515 BC, and the Greek historian Hecataeus used Armenia soon after. Xenophon described Armenian village hospitality around 401 BC. The native name recalls the legendary patriarch Hayk, whom the 5th-century chronicler Khorenatsi says defeated the Babylonian king Bel; some scholars instead connect it to Hayasa-Azzi, a Hittite vassal realm of 1600–1200 BC.
Under Artaxias I the kingdom broke free of the Seleucids in 190 BC, and between 95 and 66 BC Tigranes the Great made it the strongest power east of Rome. Ancient Armenians honoured Mithra, Anahit and Vahagn, but in 301 King Tiridates III, guided by Gregory the Illuminator, made Christianity the state religion, the first country to do so. Mesrop Mashtots devised the Armenian alphabet around 405. The Bagratid kingdom fell in 1045, and a separate Armenian state in Cilicia held a Mediterranean coastline from the 11th to the 14th century.
Up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed in the genocide of World War I. A first republic declared independence in 1918 but was absorbed into the Soviet Union by 1920, and the present republic broke away in 1991. Armenia backed the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region until Azerbaijan retook it by siege and offensive in 2023. The country belongs to the Council of Europe and also to the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union.
Source: Armenia
