Rouben Galichian exposes Azerbaijani historiography’s contradictions to sources and even its own theories
Iranian historian Roghiyye Behzad and another Iranian historian and linguist, Enayatollah Reza (1920-2010), made detailed researches on the topic of the arrival of the Turkic language in the Caucasus region, famous cartographer Rouben Galichian writes in his book Historical and Geographical Falsifications of Azerbaijan, a historical, cultural and cartographical research based on a detailed analysis backed by documentary evidence.
“Since the times of the Seljuk invasions, the ancient Azeri language of the native population of Atrpatakan gradually died out and went out of use, yielding its place to the language of the newly-arrived tribes, which established a new Turkic rule after conquering that district of Persia,” Galichian writes citing well-known specialists recognised in the world scientific community. He highlights that the sixth volume of The Cambridge History of Iran, in the section regarding the language and the culture of Timurid and the Safavid periods of Iran (1335-1736), confirms the same theory.
“Various Turkic tribes reached Atrpatakan following the Mongols and became the sovereigns and rulers there for a few centuries. It was during the reign of those newly-arrived tribes that the Turkic language, now referred to as ‘native language,’ was established in the region. That is to say, the language called Azeri today, is not the language of the modern Iranian Atrpatakan. It is a completely another language, which gave its place to the Turkic and was totally forgotten,” he writes and points out that the Turkic language spoken in modern Azerbaijan is erroneously called Azeri.
After its arrival from the Central Asia, the Turkic language underwent some changes under the influence of the ‘Azeri’ and Persian. It is now used as a spoken language in Atrpatakan and in the territory of the Azerbaijani Republic. As a result, what remained from the ancient Azeri language is just its name, which lost its meaning and is primarily used for denoting a completely alien Turkic language, which has replaced it.
By the third quarter of the nineteenth century, the intellectuals of Shirvan came to realise that without a written form, the Turkic language would not endure, which compelled Mirza Kazimbeg to create an alphabet suitable for it using the Arabic script. The new alphabet started to be used at local schools, and Mirza Fathali Akhundov was the first to write plays in Azerbaijani Turkic in 1870s.
As for the Albanian written language and literature, Galichian references the Armenian historian Koryun, according to whom, Mesrop Mashtots, the inventor of the Armenian alphabet, created a 52-letter alphabet for the people of Albania in the 5th century. However, only a few samples of the Albanian script have been preserved.
These are mainly inscriptions on stones and two palimpsests found on Mount Sinai in 1996. The Albanian manuscripts were rubbed out of the palimpsests, and the parchments were reused for Georgian writings. “However, several inscriptions and a few pages of palimpsest manuscripts cannot constitute a sufficient proof for the Azerbaijani historian Farida Mammadova to claim that there was a ‘rich and varied uniquely Albanian written culture.’ Moreover, in order to decipher the palimpsest manuscripts, the scholars have used the present-day Udi language, yet they call the discovered text ‘Albanian’,” Galichian highlights pointing to the controversies existing in the Azerbaijani theory.
In particular, Galichian writes that in the introduction and the English summary of The Political and Historical Geography of Caucasian Albania, Mammadova states that she has used Albanian, Georgian and Armenian sources for her research. The book in question is a small volume but ‘boasts an impressive 466 items in its bibliography section, and one would think that, as per the author’s claim, there would be at least some Albanian sources.’
As a result of thorough analysis of the bibliography of the book, Galichian presents the following picture: 160 Armenian sources, including Movses Khorenatsi, Anania Shirakatsi and modern Armenian historians; 105 mainly Soviet-era Russian sources; 91 Azerbaijani sources, all from the Soviet era; 47 Georgian sources; 33 European sources; 21 Greco-Roman and Latin sources; 7 pieces of Communist literature, including Marx, Lenin and others; 2 Arabic and Persian sources in Russian translation.
“The list inexplicably lacks the sources called ‘Albanian,’ which the author mentions first of all. Apparently, they are only imaginary sources,” he writes, exposing the quality of the ‘scientific’ publications by a significant part of the famous scientists of Azerbaijan.
Galichian further points out another contradiction inside Azerbaijani historians and linguists’ own theories. On the one hand, they explain the lack of Albanian literature by ‘the destruction of all written and/or carved material by the Arabs and the Armenians,’ and claim that the ‘Armenians forced the Albanians to change their written language to Armenian.’ On the other hand, these are the same historians who insist that no Armenians lived in the territory of Azerbaijan and historical Albania before the 19th century and that they invaded the region only by then.
“And another paradox appears. If there were no Armenians living in the territory of Albania in the middle ages, who forced the Albanians to forget their language and speak and write in Armenian?” Galichian wonders.
He also notes that the attempts of some historians of Azerbaijan to change the status, history and origin of the Armenian language also lead to inconsistencies. Igrar Aliyev, a historian and former director of the Institute of History of the National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan, claims, “The source of the old Armenian language is the language and dialects of the Medes who lived in the present-day Southern Azerbaijan before our era.” This assertion implies that the Median language was spoken in Atrpatakan (or, as he puts it, Southern Azerbaijan) in the past, which is not the modern Turkic language.
Galichian also highlights the Azerbaijani academician’s unfair use of sources demonstrated in his reference to the paper Aramaic Inscription from Zangezur by an Armenian scientist Anahit Perikhanian. The Armenian scientist states that the nine lines of the Aramaic script found in 1965 in Zangezur, Armenia, are written in a hitherto unknown Median language, which is a north-western dialect of an Iranian language. This helped her discover an important block of Median borrowings in Armenian, Parthian and Pahlavi languages. “This leads Aliyev to assume that the Median language and its dialects were the parent language of Armenian. If we trust in Aliyev’s theory, the Parthian and Pahlavi must also have been Median languages,” Galichian points out.
To be continued.
Born in Tabriz, Rouben Galichian is a descendant of refugees from Van who survived the Genocide. He received scholarship and studied engineering at Aston University, Birmingham (UK). Since in 1981, he started to study the rich cartographical heritage in the libraries of the UK and other European countries. His first research, Historic Maps of Armenia (in English), was published in 2004. It was a collection of maps from various libraries and museums in the world, where Armenia was noted, beginning from the 6th century to the present times. His second book, Armenia in World Cartography, was published in Yerevan in 2005. The research ‘Countries South of the Caucasus in Medieval Maps. Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan’ (in English and Armenian) was published in 2007. The book The Invention of History (in English) was published in 2009.
In his book Historical and Geographical Falsifications of Azerbaijan, published in 2013, the author details the reasons, aims and methodology of the falsification of the history of Azerbaijan and the countries of the region.