The first time Armina, (Armenia) is mentioned is in wedge writing boards, where King Dario of the 1st ruled Persia, 6th and 5th century BCE, but the name given to the Armenians – Gai or Jai – originated in the country of Gaiasa, mentioned in inscriptions on Hititic pottery from the 8th century BCE The Urartes, who were the direct ancestors of the Armenians, founded from the 9th to the 6th century BCE a powerful state whose capital was Tushpa – today the city of Van in Turkey. In the year 782 BCE, the fortress of Erebuni was founded in the northern part of the country – today Yerevan, the capital of Armenia.
When the land of Ur was disintegrated, its territory formed the framework of the birth of the ancient Armenian kingdom. Armenia’s first rulers were the satirical kings of the Persian Shah. This era was reflected in the works of Jenofont and Herodotus. Jenofonte, whose book “La Anábasis” contained a description of the 10,000 Greeks’ withdrawal from Armenia in 401-400 BCE It was a testimony that Armenia was rich in agricultural land with cattle breeding and growing wine, wheat and fruit.
After Alexander the Great’s conquests and the boom of the Seléucidas empire, a period of “Hellenization” of Armenia began, which played an important role in the country’s cultural life. The state of the Seléucidas fell into the hands of the Romans in 190 BCE and Armenia became an independent nation. The local ruler was declared king of the Great Armenia, under the name of Artashes on the 1st.
It was the beginning of a Golden Age period, which reached its maximum during Tigrán on the 2nd – or the Great. He assembled all the Armenian-speaking areas and annexed several neighboring regions. Armenia’s borders stretched from the Mediterranean in the south over the Black Sea in the north to the Caspian Sea in the east. However, Tigran’s empire was soon defeated by the Roman and partisan armies. Armenia was named “Friend of the Roman People and Allies”, a euphemism commonly used in these times about Rome’s vassal states.
According to thesciencetutor, in the first 4 centuries of our era, Armenia was close to losing its independence until it finally ceased to be a nation in 428, after the Roman Empire and the new Persian kingdom agreed to divide the land between them. One of the surviving monuments of this era is the Greek temple at Garni, close to Yerevan.
In 301 Armenia became the first country in the world to officially introduce Christianity as a state religion. At this time, the Pontifice of Armenia, the Grigori Illustrator, founded a monastery in Echmiadzin that exists to this day and which became the seat of the patriarchs of the Armenian Church. From then on, the church identified itself with the Armenian people’s character, as religion allowed to maintain popular unity while for a long time the country was without independent state leadership.
In 405, the monk Mesrop Mashtots invented an alphabet and became the progenitor of Armenia’s own writing language. The letters of this alphabet have been preserved up to our time and have helped to ensure that there has always been a straight line in Armenian culture, from ancient medieval to modern times. The 5th century was a period of flourishing of religious and worldly literature and of Armenian history writing; later the natural sciences also evolved. Ananias Shirakatsi already claimed in the 7th century that the Earth was round, and vomited the hypothesis that there were several planets inhabited by intelligence beings.
