ABSTRACT
The Kingdom of Ararat (as in Hebrew tradition — Genesis VIII.4; Jeremiah LI. 27), Urartu (as known to the Assyrians) or Biaini or Biainili (as the natives called their country), was situated to the north and the south-east of Lake Van. 1The fusion by conquest or treaty of a number of Hurrian chieftainships (see Chapter 2) had produced, by the thirteenth century BC, a powerful kingdom which, after the tenth century BC, under a succession of vigorous kings, expanded and occupied the region between the Upper Euphrates in the west and the Caspian Sea in the east (c. 46° longitude), the Caucasus mountains in the north and the Taurus Range in the south. Since c. 600 BC when the Armenians, a branch of the great Indo-European linguistic people, succeeded the Urartians, that area has been described as Armenia. I must emphasise, however, that it is thus described as a geographical, not a political region. Armenia’s political extent fluctuated enormously over a period of some 2000 years, down to the fifteenth century AD, subject to the vicissitudes of war and peace. After that, in spite of 500 years of Turkish occupation, the geographical area defined above continued to be called Armenia, just as, for example, Poland, though occupied in turn by Germans or Russians for centuries, has sustained its geographical and, like Armenia, its ethnic and linguistic identity.
