culture, but the only evidence we have for Proto-Aryan (or Indo-Iranian) comes
from the upper Tigris and upper Euphrates. Whether the Kurdish language is a
relic of this Bronze Age presence of Indo-Iranian is unknown. The Kardouchoi
whom Xenophon and the Ten Thousand met in the forbidding mountains south
of the Kentrites river (the Botan), have often been identified with the Kurdish
language. That guess may be correct, although the identification rests entirely on
a similarity of the Kurdish and Karduchian names. The earliest Kurdish literature—
a Yazidi religious text—dates only from the thirteenth century.
The whereabouts of Proto-Armenian point more precisely in the direction of
southern Caucasia. We have no reason to think that Armenian was ever spoken
anywhere other than in the land that Darius, in the Old Persian version of his
Behistun inscription, called armina(the Akkadian version of the inscription refers
to the land as urashtu, a Babylonian variant of the Assyrian urartu). In the
inscription Darius recounts at some length his suppression (in 521 BC) of a
rebellion against him in armina.^49 Although the inhabitants called their county
hayk, that name never gained currency anywhere else. From the Persians the Greeks
borrowed the exonym armina, and called the country Ἀρμενία.
The Persian Army List in Herodotos (7.73) has the Armenians and Phrygians
brigaded together, under the command of Artochmes, and identifies the Armenians
as apoikoiof the Phrygians. That, however, is an aetiological tag: the ethnographer
responsible for the list felt an obligation to explain where each of the various ethnē
he mentioned had come from.^50 Unlike Herodotos and his source, the ancient
Armenians seem to have had no knowledge of their ancestors’ migration from
Phrygia. According to the History of Armeniasaid to have been written by
Movses Khorenatsi in the fifth century (and actually written by Pseudo-Movses
Khorenatsi in the eighth), the Armenian nation was established by the eponymous
Hayk the Forefather, who led his 300 followers to Armenia from the half-finished
Tower of Babel.^51 More important than this Christian invention is that Pseudo-
Movses said nothing about a migration from Phrygia, having never read Herodotos
or any other Classical Greek historian (Pseudo-Movses’ “Greek sources” were
lifted from the Armenian translation of Eusebius’ Chronicle). What Pseudo-
Movses did write about were dozens of Armenian patriarchs and kings, with whose
fantastic feats (such as their wars against Semiramis and Sardanapalos) he filled
the huge gap between Hayk the Forefather and Alexander the Great. The aetiology
at Herodotos 7.73 that the Armenians were apoikoiof the Phrygians did not come
from the Armenians and was very likely a deduction from the similarities of the
Armenian and Phrygian languages.
Discussions of Armenian origins have been bedeviled by what historians,
following the Akkadian usage, call the kingdom of Urartu. From Tushpa, the capital
on the eastern shore of Lake Van, the “Urartian” kings dominated much of
southern Caucasia from the middle of the ninth to the beginning of the sixth
centuries BC. This kingdom represented a sharp break in southern Caucasian pre -
history, because in the centuries preceding the establishment of “Urartu” we have
no evidence for a kingdom or even for substantial settlements in the region. Ca.
850 BC, and probably inspired by the Assyrian revival under Ashurnasirpal II,
The question of origins 227