What’s “uh boy” about this? Armenia is kind of a strange cultural intersection. People in ancient times seem to have been in constant movement, although I think the place where anything really and truly “originated” is up for grabs.
Exactly.
I believe Armenia is connected to the ancient civilization of Urartu.
Armenians had a powerful kingdom in ancient times, they were a client state of the Roman Empire, they were Christianized at an early date, they provided troops in support of the Byzantine Emperors, they maintained their Christianity in the face of ferocious persecution by the Turks and continue to do so up to the present.
Americans of Armenian extraction are strongly patriotic people, hard working and industrious. And, of no less importance, Armenian women are very beautiful and exotic looking.
Too bad too many other Americans are willing to forgive the damn Turks for the evil they did against the Armenians and other Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire and even up to the present in modern Turkey. Perhaps NOW that the Damn Turks have demonstrated their perfidiousness towards America and Israel, Americans will change their minds about the Armenian holocaust.
livius: ...although I think the place where anything really and truly "originated" is up for grabs.
/bingo
Thus, "uh-boy".
One might try (based on the piles of dead horses) to make a case for Armenia to be the homeland of the Aryans, but there's older sites in Central Asia which appear to be the immediate roots of the whole works. That there were recognizable Indian subcontinent deities carried into Anatolia and the riverine areas is generally known I think. They didn't originate in Armenia, however.
Mesopotamian civ' was characterized by large-scale, settled, irrigated agriculture, something that didn't come down out of the mountains, but arose right on the spot. The RC date for a multirow barley sample -- iow, an irrigated food crop species -- was 14,000 B.P., and it's probably somewhat older (it's an uncalibrated date, and atmospheric carbon levels fluctuated a lot during the last glaciation and thereafter).
The Sumerians, whose writing system and texts are the earliest known, recorded that they'd come to the region by sea, and their own large cities (and the major rivers) had names which are not Sumerian, and not related to any other known language, meaning, whomever was there were absorbed and/or replaced, and the only trace of their tongue were the place names, which the Sumerians kept. It was a peculiarity of the Sumerians (and to some extent, the Semitic groups who followed) to attribute the foundation of human cities to non-human deities. It can be inferred from this that urban living was already recognized as very old 5000 years ago. :')
And I don't need to point out (but will anyway) that Sumerian is a language isolate, with no known relatives living or dead.