Government

[hagopn]

Re: Government

I agree with the core of your message, but the subtleties of the "confederate character" I speak of I have so far been unsuccessful on fully conveying partly due to my failure in memory of many details. I truly appreciate your attention and patience. I may sound like a repeating loop at this point, but the instances where Armenian solidarity was successfully sold to a critical enough number need to be studied very closely. An axiom is that lack of success in any endeavor indicates lack of knowledge of the subject. We have others implementing change in our psyche with rapidity, but, as William Saroyan even noticed (actually he was very perceptive, much more than we give him credit), "see if we don't laugh at the great ideas of the world." Armenians are dissidents, confederates, perhaps as a genetic trait, perhaps inherited, perhaps a combination - as I am a believer in genetic behavioral memory (something that is being accepted in science increasingly so), and to control (for lack of a better "necessary evil" term) such a population, you have to find the right recipe. Artrsuni argued that there are universal values that we all naturally share, but there are also idiosyncrasies that we to acknowledge that might prove fatal if left unexamined, unaccounted for and unchecked/not leveraged, depending on your perspective. I brought Melik Frangyul of Agulis as an example, as a parallel to Ter Petrosyan. David Beg was successful to a large degree, but key players, key members of the nobility such as Frangyul were never in the fold and preferred Ottoman rule. Very little has been asked as to why. Today we just act bitterly when we read anti-nationalist rhetoric run rampant, such as that espoused by Ter Petrossyan, and automatically make the accusations of treason. Be that as it may, there is a reason and source for the treasonous behavior that needs to be examined and mitigated. Personal narcissism is easy to use. External forces are easy to blame. All have a part to play. What can be done to mitigate these circumstances?

[Haykakan]

Re: Government

"What can be done to mitigate these circumstances?"
This is the question we need to address. We cannot much control what external forces will or will not do but what we can do is instill some sort of unity and a feeling of belonging to a people-to a nation. We need to make the diasporan think of Hayastan as his/her hairenik, we need to make the hayastantsi show some faith to the leaders that are good and to keep hope alive. We need to act in situations where we will make a difference like perhaps in Syria by taking up arms and working with that government. We need to make a difference somewhere so that we are not just another grain of sand in the hourglass of time. I do not believe we can counter external forces without having a strong united nation and building such a nation via education and investment needs to be our main goal in my opinion.

[bell-the-cat]

Re: Government

(Please, there is no evidence of Urartuan "language" to differentiate it from Armenian. It's nonsense. With all due respect to David Lang, his uneducated guesstimations about "some Urartuan elements that we think were still be referred to", which is the only real basis for the assumption of "Urartuan remnants" past the 6th century b.c. in any source today, is based on nothing. The fact is that there is only evidence of cultural and political continuity. Close examination reveals that the Yervanduni were part and parcel of the "Urartuan" political scene long before their ascension to the throne)

The preening, pontificating, ever-anonymous Hagopn again thinks he can attack a named individual. What qualifications has this anonymous person got that makes him think he can cast aside the academic opinions of ALL legitimate scholars of Urartu? If Hagopn is anyone of standing he should give us his name so his opinions can maybe be given some credence. If he is a nobody, he should shut up and stop his offensive ill-founded attacks.

Urartian as expressed in their cuneiform inscriptions, is not Armenian, though there are several hundred individual words in Urartian that are believed to have passed from it into Armenian. Urartu was an empire that attacked and occupied its immediate neighbours and attempted to impose a homogenious Urartian culture on them, building identikit Urartian temples and fortifications and palaces in all the captured territories. The actions of Urartu probably did much to consolidate the native peoples, establishing the conditions that, post-Urartu , led to those peoples eventually becoming Armenians. However only simplistic and ignorant popularists go around calling Urartians Armenians: there were no Armenians when there were Urartians.

I once had the sad experience of witnessing an otherwise intelligent Armenian being rather cruely embarrassed by a Turkish archaeologist thanks to that Armenian's reliance on now-obsolete Soviet-era publications. The study of Urartu has advanced far beyond the era of the 1950 and 1960s and these old works and the opinions in them should not be relied upon.

Do you think Italians go around obsessing about the ethnicity and statehood and govening methods of the Etruscans?

[hagopn]

Re: Government

Dear Mr. Ax Grinder, I have respect for Lang, but cannot accept "guesses" with no evidence as the basis for theories.

Urartuan as expressed in cuneiform is undertermined on whether or not it was the same language as the vernacular. There is the lack of input by Armenian scholars and lack of comparative studies with Armenian historically. These are still up for debate, and things are changing.

There is no evidence of an Urartuan culture as distinct from the Armenian. There is plenty of evidence to suggest they were the same continuous culture.

[hagopn]

Re: Government

But I would be interested to read the debate between the Armenian and Turk. Wait, you said "Armenian's reliance on now-obsolete Soviet-era publications," versus a Turk's reliance on obsolete and revisionist "western" Turcophile scholarship? But, wait again, Soviet era scholarship was actually biased in favor of Urartu has having been anything except an Armenian dynasty. Suggestions had been made that even the Nakh/Vainakh was the inheritors of the "Caucasoid Urartuan language." The Soviet era was a total mess of conflicting interesting during which, ironically, the Armenian academic tended to be ultra-conservative in his opinions and didn't ever dare not toe the Soviet line. Are you kidding me? Armenian history was relegated a mere 4 pages of pseudohistory to the grade school levels, and the University level was completely in sync with the Turcophilia of the west.

I have been debating Turks on this issue in various Yahoo groups, and quite frankly they have impressed me little, even the non-fascist ones. There is in fact little added to the debate by current scholarship except on the Armenian side. The tremendous amount evidence to suggest cultural continuity yielded unexpected results, and, even though there is no "crystallized paradigm" as of yet, the notion of a distinct Urartuan culture to that of Armenian is a dead horse.

[hagopn]

Re: Government

Let me also ask Sim what "cultures and languages" did the Urartuans attack and subdue? Do we have records of these languages? (We do not)

[Haykakan]

Re: Government

Hey this is getting off topic -please discuss this in another thread

[hagopn]

Re: Government

Haykanan, it is actually another wrench thrown by a fanatic into the topic.

Let's get back to the topic, then. Let's assume that there was a gradual cultural gradation from Urartuan to Armenian in the general population. Is that also of any relevance when discussing the political habits of the folk that have lived there for generations? Apparently the transition, if there was one (which there probably was not) from Urartuan to Armenian was peaceful and comprehensively retained much of its former cultural character. So goes with its population's political character and governing methods.

Also, does the above scenario - which is acknowledged to be the case, more likely indicate continuity or a "radical ethnic cataclysm?" "Radical ethnic cataclism" would have to have happened in order for a total decline and ascendency between two cultures in what really amounts to around 2 ro 3 decades, barely a generation. That just does not happen.

Therefore, the topic stands. Political traditions in Armenia were as I describe for many millennia, regardless of the linguistic and ethnic arguments brought about to invalidate the link between Armenians and their, even if argued to be linguistically distinct (which is never the case in linguistics, by the way), cultural and genetic continuity - something that surprisingly there is a consensus on, the "Anatolian genetic continuity". Even the most die-hard opponents of Urartuan/Armenian continuity, ssuch as James Russell in his prime, agreed ot the "genetic and cultural continuity" idea.

[bell-the-cat]

Re: Government

Dear Mr. Ax Grinder, I have respect for Lang, but cannot accept "guesses" with no evidence as the basis for theories.

Urartuan as expressed in cuneiform is undertermined on whether or not it was the same language as the vernacular.

I can't believe that some offhand stuff I wrote decades ago on a pre-worldwideweb aol forum as a response to some Turkish propaganda actually got adopted by Armenian extremists as an excuse for their inability to connect written Urartian to spoken Armenian. If you can find any reference to this "theory" prior to the late 1980s or very early 1990s, I'd be surprised and, with apologies, withdraw my claim to have coined it. I think I coined it because there were Turks around claiming the Urartians were Turks.

The absence of something cannot be used as the basis for claiming the existence of something else. There is no written "vernacular Urartian" - so nobody has evidence it even existed. And you were the one claiming the Urartians are Armenian - so why are you now suggesting that the rulers of Urartu were not Armenian and that their temple and palace and cultic and other monumental cuneiform inscriptions were written in their own non-Armenian language?

That anti-Armenian nutter I mentioned in another post (who turned anti-Armenian in the mid 1980s after his California antiques shop innocently called "Turkish Bazar" was targeted by extremist Armenians because of its name), and who later went insane and got carted off to a lunatic assylum for a few years, was one of the chief posters there, copypasting Turkish genocide-denying propaganda. This all might be obscure and trivial history, but at least it is real history.

[bell-the-cat]

Re: Government

Hey this is getting off topic -please discuss this in another thread

Yes, partly sorry. But going off-topic is common every where here. And it was as a response to hagopn who went wildly off-topic by starting to suggesting circumstances in 800bc urartu or 4thc Armenia or 12thC Cilicia had some relevance to governance issues inside today's Armenia. And who claimed that chosen methods of government are dependant on "genetic behavioral memory" and that there is some sort of particular "genetic behavioral memory" that Armenians have (even before there even were Armenians) and that other don't have.