Over the centuries Armenians have had an influence on many a local culture and the world civilization at large. It is difficult to argue the Armenian people’s tremendous potential and their contributions to a wide range of discoveries that have changed the world. Needless to say, it is almost impossible to describe all of these achievements (do check out 100 Armenians Who Changed the World to see us try, though), but there are some outstanding examples we’d like to share with you. If you’re Armenian, be proud! If not, try to feel inspired…and not intimidated.
BLUE PAINT
The rise of the first city-states led to the emergence of new visual forms. The oldest monumental paintings (4th millennium BC) are found in the Sumerian temples of Eridu and Uruk. The Gates of Ishtar in Babylon take your breath away. The famous Mesopotamian blue was extracted from lapis lazuli and from the Armenian azurite, which was later called arminakun by the Arabs and armenium by the Greeks.
Armenian blue paint was highly prized during the Hellenistic period. Pliny the Elder wrote: “Armenia sends us a dyeing agent by the name of Armenium. This substance is a stone that dyes like chrysocolla. The best one is that which is closest in color to chrysocolla blue. It differs from blue by its moderate paleness, making it softer. Revered as one of the expensive paints that were given out to the painter by the master.”
LAVASH
The domestication of animals that provided people with meat and dairy products led to the birth of pastoral farming. As populations grew, it became seasonal with cattle grazing in distant pastures. The result of it was an increased social status of men who had mastered the new profession of himself as a shepherd and thus carried out an important mission – they turned into a guarantors of the safety of the herd.
For shepherds, long stretches away from the settlement necessitated the baking of a special “shepherd’s bread” that combined quantitative (there had to be enough of it) and qualitative (it should not spoil quickly) benefits. Such bread was the tonir-baked Armenian lavash – a bread cake (sometimes up to a meter in length) that folded into a roll and could be kept for a long time (lavash bread is also baked to last the whole winter).
ARMINACUN
Nature is unusually stingy when it comes to blue color. The sky (and its mirror reflection in the water), the kingfisher bird, the Morpho butterfly, the blue agave and a few minerals – that’s basically the entire spectrum of places where the blue pigment is visible to the naked eye. Was that the reason why in ancient times, blue stones were so highly prized?
In Mesopotamia, both lazuli (“the Afghan stone”) from Badakhshan and azurite (“the Armenian stone”) from the copper mines of Armenia were used extensively. Despite very different origins, these minerals are often substituted for each other. It is hence not surprising that the Hittite word kuwanna is also translated as “Copper Blue” and as “lapis lazuli”1. Eastern authors such as Avicenna and Al-Biruni did not distinguish between the two… So, at the turn of the 1st-2nd millennium, Biruni wrote: “The lazuli in Rumian is called arminakun, the word is formed like an adjective from the word ‛Armenia’, as Armenian stone looks a lot like it.”
IRON
The discovery of iron was the triumphant conclusion of the earliest stage of searching for the best tools to increase productivity. The first written evidence of iron is found on clay tablets in the archives of Pharaoh Amenhotep III and Akhenaten (1450–1400 BC), where among the gifts from the “king of Mitanni and the ruler of Armenia” a “dagger and rings made of good iron” are listed.
Indian archaeologist S. Dikshit said that “the epicenter of the Iron Age revolution was in the mountains of Armenia”1. German mining engineer K. Bax believed that “it was on the Armenian Highlands that man first learned how to obtain and use copper.” A prominent British archaeologist Gordon Childe drew attention to another aspect: “The discovery of an effective method of iron smelting (or rather, the propagation of the secret long kept by a tribe of Armenian highlanders) broke the monopoly of the despots of the Bronze Age.”
COPPER
The beginning of copper smelting heralded a new era – the Copper Age – and gave an unprecedented impetus to the development of civilization. The most ancient copper artifacts are those from the archaeological collections located in the headwaters of the Tigris River village Hasankeyf (8th-7th millennium BC). The earliest known smelting was located in other parts of the Armenian highlands, from where copper was sent to different regions of the Ancient World. According to the British Egyptologist G. Hall, “the Egyptians surely acquired their copperprocessing skills from Mesopotamia through Syria, possibly from the Armenoid race, which appeared in Lower Egypt, apparently, long before the end of the pre-dynastic period. It is likely that the Armenoids [...] originally extracted it from some other source that lay further to the north, namely, in the mountains of present-day Armenia.”
WHEAT
At the end of the Neolithic Age, humanity went through an unprecedented change, moving away from the hunter-gatherer society to agricultural practices and animal husbandry. Since that period, wheat has become the most cultivated crop on the planet. The Armenian Plateau and the adjacent regions of Anatolia have the distinction of being one of its points of origin in the world. To this day, there is still a spot with some rare species of wild wheat, including Triticum araraticum and Triticum urartu.
“I’ve had the opportunity to research many countries that are considered to be ancient agricultural societies, – wrote the prominent paleobotanist N. Vavilov – but it is difficult to find a richer, more interesting place than Shorbulakh in Armenia. I would suggest that a part of it must be allocated [...] to preserve this interesting document of global significance.”
OBSIDIAN
Among the huge variety of precious stone treasures of Armenia, there is one mineral that stands apart, one that plays a pivotal role in the early stages of human development. That mineral is volcanic glass, better known as obsidian. The Armenian name for obsidian is vanakat. Back in the Stone Age the inhabitants of the Armenian Highland began to use this ornamental material to make tools. Obsidian can have different shades of color – black, brown, bronze, sometimes reddish, greenish or bluish. There is also obsidian that is absolutely transparent and colorless. The entire palette of this unique stone can be found only in Armenia. That is also where the richest deposits of it are located. Obsidian has been brought to neighboring regions from Armenia since ancient times.
