responded to it in goodly numbers and were placed in the ranks as
well as in the hospitals as nurses and attendants. During the first
half of last year they were taken from the ranks and hospitals and
placed in the road-gangs. The doctors and druggists were still
retained as such, but pushed to the rear. The artisans of this land
were mostly from this race, and many were retained here for such
work, as there was need, even after the others were deported last
June.
As the Turkish Army is retreating these bands are being massacred in
cold blood. Here is an item that was brought to me by the brother of
one of our school-girls. He had been in the road-gang and then was
put in with a crowd of workers who were preparing a club-house here.
In January they were sent to Erzindjan and there lodged in prison.
When the Commander and Governor from here arrived there the first
order was to take these fifty Armenians out and shoot them. Four
escaped by falling and lying under the dead till evening, and then
by hard travelling came here. It is said that other gangs are being
treated in a similar way.
Now the request is to ask you if you have means to bring these facts
to the attention of Mr. Morgenthau, that he might intercede in the
name of humanity against this wholesale slaughter of these men who
have been working for the Turkish Army. Not a few women and children
are being rescued as this side advances, having been kept by the
Kurds. We were able to keep about twenty girls, with two women and
one of our men teachers, who is still with us as my interpreter.
The Armenians of Russia are spending a great deal of money and time
in this rescue work, for which many have come here. They feel very
deeply when they hear these reports from the other side of the
fighting line. I sincerely hope that some pressure can be brought to
bear to stop this cruelty.
A SUMMARY OF ARMENIAN HISTORY
UP TO AND INCLUDING
THE YEAR 1915.
I. THE EUROPEAN WAR AND ARMENIA.
The War has brought us into a new relation with Armenia and the
Armenian people. We knew them before as the name of an ancient
civilisation, a stubborn rearguard of Christendom in the East, a
scene of mission work and massacres and international rivalry; but
only a few of us—missionaries, geographers, travellers and an
occasional newspaper correspondent—were personally acquainted with
the country and its inhabitants. To most people they remained a
name, and when we read of their sufferings or traditions or
achievements they made little more impression than the doings of the
Hittites and Assyrians, who moved across the same Near Eastern
amphitheatre several millenniums ago. We had no living contact, no
natural relation, with Armenia in our personal or even in our
political life.
Such a relation has suddenly been created between us by the War, and
it is one of the strangest ironies of war that it fuses together and
illuminates the very fabric it destroys. The civilisation in which
we lived was like a labyrinth, so huge and intricate that none of
the dwellers in it could altogether grasp its structure, while most
of them were barely conscious that it had any structural design at
all. But now that the War has caught it and it is all aflame, the
unity and symmetry of the building are revealed to the common eye.
As the glare lights it up from end to end, it stands out in its
glory, in matchless outline and perspective; for the first time (and
possibly for the last) we see its parts simultaneously and in proper
relation, and realise for one moment the marvel and mystery of this
civilisation that is perishing—the subtle, immemorial, unrelaxing
effort that raised it up and maintained it, and the impossibility of
improvising any equivalent structure in its place. Then the fire
masters its prey; the various parts of the labyrinth fall in one by
one, the light goes out of them, and nothing is left but smoke and
ashes. This is the catastrophe that we are witnessing now, and we do
not yet know whether it will be possible to repair it. But if the
future is not so dark as it appears, and what has perished can in
some measure be restored, our best guide and inspiration in the task
will be that momentary, tragic, unique vision snatched out of the
catastrophe itself.
The Armenians are not protagonists in the War; they bear none of the
guilt for its outbreak and can have little share in the
responsibility of building up a better future. But they have been
seared more cruelly than any of us by the flames, and, under this
fiery ordeal, their individual character as a nation and their part
in the community of the civilised world have been thrown into their
true relief.
For the first time, England and the Armenians are genuinely in touch
with one another. In this desperate struggle between freedom and
reaction we are fighting on the same side, striving for the same
end. Our lot in the struggle has not, indeed, been the same, for
while England is able to act as well as to suffer, the Armenians
have suffered with hardly the power to strike a blow. But this
difference of external fortune only strengthens the inward moral
bond; for we, who are strong, are fighting not merely for this or
that political advantage, this or that territorial change, but for a
principle. The Powers of the Entente have undertaken the
championship of small nationalities that cannot champion themselves.
We have solemnly acknowledged our obligation to fulfil our vow in
the case of Belgium and Serbia, and now that the Armenians have been
overtaken by a still worse fate than the Serbians and the Belgians,
their cause, too, has been taken up into the general cause of the
Allies. We cannot limit our field in doing battle for our ideal.
It is easier, of course, for the people of France, Great Britain and
America to sympathise with Belgium than with a more unfamiliar
nation in a distant zone of the War. It needs little imagination to
realise acutely that the Belgians are “people like ourselves,”
suffering all that we should suffer if the same atrocities were
committed upon us; and this realisation was made doubly easy by the
speedy publication of minute, abundant, first-hand testimony. The
Armenians have no such immediate access to our sympathies, and the
initial unfamiliarity can only be overcome by a personal effort on
the part of those who give ear to their case; but the evidence on
which that case rests has been steadily accumulating, until now it
is scarcely less complete or less authoritative than the evidence
relating to Belgium. The object of the present volume has been to
present the documents to English and American readers in as accurate
and orderly a form as possible.
Armenia has not been without witness in her agony. Intense suffering
means intense emotional experience, and this emotion has found
relief in written records of the intolerable events which obsessed
the witnesses’ memories. Some of the writers are Armenians, a larger
number are Americans and Europeans who were on the spot, and who
were as poignantly affected as the victims themselves. There are a
hundred and forty-nine of these documents, and many of them are of
considerable length; but in their total effect they are something
more than an exhaustive catalogue of the horrors they set out to
describe. The flames of war illuminate the structure of the building
as well as the destruction of it, and the testimony extorted under
this fiery ordeal gives an extraordinarily vivid impression of
Armenian life—the life of plain and mountain, town and village,
intelligenzia and bourgeoisie and peasantry—at the moment when it
was overwhelmed by the European catastrophe.
In Armenia, though not in Europe, the flames have almost burnt
themselves out, and, for the moment, we can see nothing beyond smoke
and ashes. Life will assuredly spring up again when the ashes are
cleared away, for attempts to exterminate nations by atrocity,
though certain of producing almost infinite human suffering, have
seldom succeeded in their ulterior aim. But in whatever shape the
new Armenia arises, it will be something utterly different from the
old. The Armenians have been a very typical element in that group of
humanity which Europeans call the “Near East,” but which might
equally well be called the “Near West” from the Indian or the
Chinese point of view[191]. There has been something pathological
about the history of this Near Eastern World. It has had an undue
share of political misfortunes, and had lain for centuries in a kind
of spiritual paralysis between East and West—belonging to neither,
partaking paradoxically of both, and wholly unable to rally itself
decidedly to one or the other—when it was involved with Europe in
the European War. The shock of that crowning catastrophe seems to
have brought the spiritual neutrality of the Near East to a violent
end, and however dubious the future of Europe may be, it is almost
certain that it will be shared henceforth by all that lies between
the walls of Vienna and the walls of Aleppo and Tabriz[192]. This
final gravitation towards Europe may be a benefit to the Near East
or another chapter in its misfortunes—that depends on the condition
in which Europe emerges from the War; but, in either case, it will
be a new departure in its history. It has been drawn at last into a
stronger orbit, and will travel on its own paralytic, paradoxical
course no more. This gives a historical interest to any record of
Near Eastern life in the last moments of the Ancient Régime, and
these Armenian documents supply a record of a very intimate and
characteristic kind. The Near East has never been more true to
itself than in its lurid dissolution; past and present are fused
together in the flare.
II. AN OUTLINE OF ARMENIAN HISTORY.
The documents in this volume tell their own story, and a reader
might be ignorant of the places with which they deal and the points
of history to which they refer, and yet learn from them more about
human life in the Near East than from any study of text-books and
atlases. At the same time a general acquaintance with the
geographical setting and historical antecedents is clearly an
assistance in understanding the full significance of the events
recorded here, and as this information is not widely spread or very
easily accessible, it has seemed well to publish an outline of it,
for the reader’s convenience, in the same volume as the documents
themselves. As many as possible of the places referred to are marked
on the map at the end of the book, while here, in this historical
summary, a brief account may be given of who the Armenians are and
where they live.
Like the English, the French and most other nations, the Armenians
have developed a specific type of countenance, and yet it would not
always be easy to tell them by sight, for they are as hybrid in
their physical stock as every other European or Near Eastern people.
There are marked differences of pigmentation, feature and build
between the Armenians of the East, West and South, and between the
mountaineers, plain-dwellers and people of the towns, and it would
be rash to speculate when these various strains came in, or to lay
it down that they were not all present already at the date at which
we first begin to know something about the inhabitants of the
country[193].
We hear of them first in the annals of Assyria, where the Armenian
plateau appears as the land of Nairi—a no-man’s-land, raided
constantly but ineffectually by Assyrian armies from the lowlands of
Mosul. But in the ninth century B.C. the petty cantons of Nairi
coalesced into the Kingdom of Urartu[194], which fought Assyria on
equal terms for more than two hundred years and has left a native
record of its own. The Kings of Urartu made their dwelling on the
citadel of Van[195]. The face of the rock is covered with their
inscriptions, which are also found as far afield as the
neighbourhood of Malatia, Erzeroum and Alexandropol. They borrowed
from Assyria the cuneiform script, and the earliest inscriptions at
Van are written in the Assyrian language; but they quickly adapted
the foreign script to their native tongue, which has been deciphered
by English and German scholars, and is considered by them to be
neither Semitic nor Indo-European, nor yet to have any discernible
affinity with the still obscurer language of the Hittites further
west. We can only assume that the people who spoke it were
indigenous in the land. Probably they were of one blood with their
neighbours in the direction of the Caucasus and the Black Sea,
Saspeires[196] and Chalybes and others; and if, as ethnology seems
to show, an indigenous stock is practically ineradicable, these
primitive peoples of the plateau are probably the chief ancestors,
in the physical sense, of the present Armenian race[197].
The modern Armenian language, on the other hand, is not descended
from the language of Urartu, but is an Indo-European tongue. There
is a large non-Indo-European element in it—larger than in most known
branches of the Indo-European family—and this has modified its
syntax as well as its vocabulary. It has also borrowed freely and
intimately from the Persian language in all its phases—a natural
consequence of the political supremacy which Iran asserted over
Armenia again and again, from the sixth century B.C. to the
nineteenth century A.D. But when all these accretions have been
analysed and discarded, the philologists pronounce the basis of
modern Armenian to be a genuine Indo-European idiom—either a dialect
of the Iranian branch or an independent variant, holding an
intermediate position between Iranian and Slavonic.
This language is a much more important factor in the national
consciousness of the modern Armenians than their ultimate physical
ancestry, but its origin is also more difficult to trace. Its
Indo-European character proves that, at some date or other, it must
have been introduced into the country from without[198], and the
fact that a non-Indo-European language held the field under the
Kings of Urartu suggests that it only established itself after the
Kingdom of Urartu fell. But the earliest literary monuments of the
modern tongue only date from the fifth century A.D., a thousand
years later than the last inscription in the Urartian language, so
that, as far as the linguistic evidence is concerned, the change may
have occurred at any time within this period. One language, however,
does not usually supplant another without considerable displacements
of population, and the only historical event of this kind sufficient
in scale to produce such a result seems to be the migration of the
Cimmerians and Scythians in the seventh century B.C. These were
nomadic tribes from the Russian steppes, who made their way round
the eastern end of the Caucasus, burst through into the Moghan
plains and the basin of Lake Urmia, and terrorised Western Asia for
several generations, till they were broken by the power of the Medes
and absorbed in the native population. It was they who made an end
of the Kingdom of Urartu, and the language they brought with them
was probably an Indo-European dialect answering to the basic element
in modern Armenian. Probability thus points to these seventh century
invaders as being the source of the present language, and perhaps
also of the equally mysterious names of “Hai(k)” and “Haiasdan,” by
which the speakers of this language seem always to have called
themselves and their country. But this is a conjecture, and nothing
more[199], and we are left with the bare fact that Armenian[200] was
the established language of the land by the fifth century A.D.
The Armenian language might easily have perished and left less
record of its existence than the Urartian. It is a vigorous language
enough, yet it would never have survived in virtue of its mere
vitality. The native Anatolian dialects of Lydia and Cilicia, and
the speech of the Cappadocians[201], the Armenians’ immediate
neighbours on the west, were extinguished one by one by the
irresistible advance of Greek, and Armenian would assuredly have
shared their fate if it had not become the canonical language of a
national church before Greek had time to penetrate so far eastward.
Armenia lay within the radius of Antioch and Edessa (Ourfa), two of
the earliest and strongest centres of Christian propaganda. King
Tiridates (Drdat) of Armenia was converted to Christianity some time
during the latter half of the third century A.D.[202] and was the
first ruler in the world to establish the Christian Faith as his
State religion. Christianity in Armenia adopted a national garb from
the first. In 410 A.D. the Bible was translated into the Armenian
language, in a new native script specially invented for the purpose,
and this achievement was followed by a great outburst of national
literature during the course of the fifth century. These fifth
century works are, as has been said, the earliest monuments of the
Armenian language. Most of them, it is true, are simply rather
painstaking translations of Greek and Syriac theology, and the bulk
of the creative literature was theological too. But there was also a
notable school of historical writers (Moses of Khorene is its most
famous representative), and the really important result of the
stimulus that Christianity brought was the permanent preservation of
the language’s existence and its development into a medium for a
national literature of a varied kind.
Thus the conversion of Armenia to Christianity, which took place at
a more or less ascertainable date, was an even more important factor
in the evolution of Armenian nationality than the original
introduction of the national language, and the Armenians have done
well to make St. Gregory the Illuminator, the Cappadocian Missionary
to whom the conversion was due, their supreme national hero[203].
Henceforth, church and language mutually sustained each other, to
the great enhancement of the vital power of both. They were, in
fact, merely complementary aspects of the same national
consciousness, and the national character of the church was further
emphasised when it diverged in doctrine from the main body of
Christendom—not by the formulation of any new or heretical dogma,
but by omission to ratify the modifications of the primitive creed
which were introduced by the Œcumenical Councils of the fifth
century A.D.[204]
This nationalisation of the church was the decisive process by which
the Armenians became a nation, and it was also this that made them
an integral part of the Near Eastern world. Christianity linked the
country with the West as intimately as the cuneiform script of
Urartu had linked it with the civilisation of Mesopotamia; and the
Near Eastern phenomenon consists essentially in the paradox that a
series of populations on the borderland of Europe and Asia developed
a national life that was thoroughly European in its religion and
culture, without ever succeeding in extricating themselves
politically from that continual round of despotism and anarchy which
seems to be the political dispensation of genuinely Oriental
countries.
No communities in the world have had a more troubled political
history than these Near Eastern nationalities, and none have known
how to preserve their church and their language so doggedly through
the most appalling vicissitudes of conquest and oppression. In this
regard the history of Armenia is profoundly characteristic of the
Near East as a whole.
The strong, compact Kingdom of Urartu lies at the dawn of Armenian
history like a golden age. It had only existed two centuries when it
was shattered by the invaders from the Russian steppes, and the
anarchy into which they plunged the country had to be cured by the
imposition of a foreign rule. In 585 B.C. the nomads were cowed and
the plateau annexed by Cyaxares the Mede, and, after the Persians
had taken over the Medes’ inheritance, the great organiser Darius
divided this portion of it into two governments or satrapies. One of
these seems to have included the basins of Urmia and Van, and part
of the valley of the Aras[205]; the other corresponded approximately
to the modern Vilayets of Bitlis, Mamouret-ul-Aziz and Diyarbekir,
and covered the upper valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates[206]. They
were called respectively the satrapies of Eastern and Western
Armenia, and this is the origin of the name by which the Haik and
their Haiasdan are now almost universally known to their neighbours.
The word “Armenia” (Armina)[207] first appears in Darius’
inscriptions; the Greeks adopted it from the Persian official usage,
and from the Greeks it has spread to the rest of the world,
including the Osmanli Turks[208].
Under the Persian Dynasty of the Achæmenids and their Macedonian
successors, the two Armenian satrapies remained mere administrative
divisions. Subject to the payment of tribute, the satraps were
practically independent and probably hereditary, but the rulers’
autonomy did not enable their subjects to develop any distinctive
national life. In religion and culture the country took on a strong
Persian veneer; and the situation was not essentially changed when,
early in the second century B.C., the two reigning satraps revolted
simultaneously from their overlord, the Seleucid King of Western
Asia[209], and each founded a royal dynasty of their own. The
decisive change was accomplished by Tigranes (Dikran) the Great (94
to 56 B.C.), a scion of the Eastern Dynasty, who welded the two
principalities into one kingdom, and so created the first strong
native sovereignty that the country had known since the fall of
Urartu five centuries before.
If Gregory the Illuminator is the ecclesiastical hero of Armenia,
King Tigranes is his political forerunner and counterpart. He was
connected by marriage with Mithradates, the still more famous King
of Pontic Cappadocia, who may be taken as the first exponent of the
Near Eastern idea. Mithradates attempted to build an empire that
should be at once cosmopolitan and national, Hellenic and Iranian,
of the West and of the East, and Tigranes was profoundly influenced
by his brilliant neighbour and ally. He set himself the parallel
ambition of reconstructing round his own person the kingdom of the
Seleucids, which had been shaken a century before by a rude
encounter with Rome, weakened still further by the defection of
Tigranes’ own predecessors, and was now in the actual throes of
dissolution. He laid himself out a new capital on the northern rim
of the Mesopotamian steppe, somewhere near the site of Ibrahim
Pasha’s Viran Shehr, and peopled it with masses of exiles deported
from the Greek cities he devastated in Syria and Cilicia. It was to
be the Hellenistic world-centre for an Oriental King of Kings; but
all his dreams, like Mithradates’, were shattered by the methodical
progress of the Roman power. A Roman army ignominiously turned
Tigranes out of Tigranokerta, and sent back his Greek exiles
rejoicing to their homes. The new Armenian kingdom failed to
establish its position as a great power, and had to accept the
position of a buffer state between Rome on the west and the Parthian
rulers of Iran. Nevertheless, Tigranes’ work is of supreme political
importance in Armenian history. He had consolidated the two
satrapies of Darius into a united kingdom, powerful enough to
preserve its unity and independence for nearly five hundred years.
It was within this chrysalis that the interaction of religion and
language produced the new germ of modern Armenian nationality; and
when the chrysalis was rent at last, the nation emerged so strongly
grown that it could brave the buffets of the outer world.