"The monetary economy of Armenia in the third to tenth centuries. The Arab and Sassanid periods". This is the title of Armine Zohraian's work, the edition of which depicts coins clearly having nothing to do with Armenia or the Armenians - the inscriptions in Arabic script are clearly visible on these coins.

Nevertheless, Armenian "scholars" continue to argue about a certain "economy" and "coins" of Armenia at a time when the state of Armenia did not exist as such. Historians and chroniclers of other nations simply do not record any sovereign Armenian state during this period. There have not even been vassal formations called "Armenia" since the 5th century. There were border provinces of neighbouring empires bordering the region, the Roman (Byzantine) Empire and first the Sassanid state and then the Arab Caliphate.

The names of a number of frontier femes (provinces) of the Roman Empire contained the geographic name of the region under the name "Armenia" - no more than that. 

However, a province, by definition, is never self-sufficient, especially a frontier province. To suggest that the border provinces had "outstanding cultural centres and cities which exceeded Constantinople in scale is inconceivable.

It is known that here were places of exile, a kind of "Romani Siberia", here, for example, in the first exile exiled John Chrysostom, who does not say anything about "ancient and great Armenians" in his letters and writings. But till the 18th century most European scientists believed that it was John Chrysostom who developed the Armenian alphabet and there was no information about Mesrop Mashtots and moreover that he apparently created the Georgian alphabet too.

Meanwhile, if you listen to Armenian falsifiers, their ancestors in the great Armenia lived almost exclusively in "highly developed" cities, engaged in science, literature and art. Yes, during the years of the USSR, the "great Armenian literature" and the mass of Armenian nationalist freeloaders "scientists" and "historians" were financed from the Union budget.

But what about the funding and "feeding" of prominent "Armenian luminaries" in the Middle Ages? It is well known that at least 50-100 people had to "plough" on the land and engage in agriculture to feed one "scientist or artist" in that era. Such was the economy at the time and agricultural productivity in general.  It was barely enough to feed themselves, especially in the conditions of extreme highland farming and a rather harsh climate.

But not only "scientists and poets" were needed. They also needed administrators, the military and the clergy. They also needed to be fed.

Therefore, science and art then were concentrated mainly in "imperial" centres, such as Constantinople in the West, or Damascus and Baghdad in the East. Or in large monasteries, but again, which were provided by significant economically and economically developed territories.

Just how could "the great ancient Armenian nation" have had such a fantastic number of "scholar-writers and philosophers", who wrote so many essays on any subject, at a time when other, much more numerous nations could count such figures on one hand, and almost nothing remained of them (compared to the "volumes of works" from the Armenian ones)? How this could happen in the poor periphery of the empires of those times, where even now the population is not well fed, is beyond comprehension. Moreover, these "Armenian luminaries" were maintained by a people that did not have their own empire, but rather a people that had no statehood at all. A nation identified with a marginal sect, and living not only on the distant periphery of the empires of that time, but also being persecuted and "second-rate" in the empires themselves.

In other words, unlike the Soviet government, which "slaughtered" the Armenian nationalists with funding, the medieval states on whose lands they lived were regularly "robbed" as heretics and infidels. In terms of simple economics, such a huge number of artefacts and "ancient writings" can then be explained The Armenian falsifiers simply cannot explain such a number of artefacts and "ancient writings", which they claim to be "Armenian spiritual heritage" today.

Nowadays, trying to justify their "zeal and civilization" and contrast it with the "savagery of nomadic herdsman Turks", Armenian woe-historians go against the well-known objective facts of human economic history.

In reality, it should be noted that not only in the vastness of Asia, but also in a large part of Europe nomadic and pastoral nomadism was much more developed than now. This was simply due to the fact that the level of agricultural development at that time did not allow as efficient use of land resources in the mountainous and steppe regions as it does today.

First, in Europe and Asia in ancient and medieval times, the yields of the same wheat and barley were low in the highlands. There were no "Michurinians" who developed frost-resistant varieties. Potatoes, so well adapted to cold climate and extreme weather conditions, were not yet known in the "Old World".

These days, the "ancient Armenians" in the highland regions of the Republic of Armenia can live off potato farming. And what did the "ancient Armenians" do, before Columbus discovered America? What did they live on? And they supported their "scientists". After all, there was no opportunity to go to Russia to earn money, or "help from the diaspora" from the rich USA and France.

Herding was the main specialization of agriculture in the mountainous regions. But for almost half a year the mountains are covered with snow, cattle breeding is costly and inefficient. It is much more efficient to drive the cattle to winter pastures in valleys. And this type of economy, which allowed the maximum use of natural resources, was characteristic of the Turkic peoples, whom Armenian historians now look down upon with arrogance, contrasting it with the supposedly "native, highly cultured" Armenians. It was precisely this kind of economic structure that allowed them to feed themselves and to feed their rulers, clergy, writers and "scientists" (but certainly not as many as the "ancient Armenians").

Needless to say, farming was developed in the valleys and plains, where the conditions were favourable. However, again, in many areas such farming was impossible without artificial irrigation, and a power backed by military force could guarantee the functioning of irrigation systems and organise their protection.

The military force, 'almost ready warriors', were mainly supplied by the pastoralist groups, where, by virtue of the need to escort and protect herds and ride, every man was a warrior (interestingly, to this day in Georgian the words 'horseman' and 'warrior' sound the same - 'mkhedari' mean the same thing). And these warriors were taken into service by empires competing for "border" regions.

Both sedentary farming in the valleys and both nomadic and distant pastoralism in the mountainous and steppe regions have for centuries been characteristic of the economy of Turkic peoples, who were the original autochthonous population of the lands claimed by Armenian nationalists today.  The pastoral way of life of a significant part of the population, the natural relationship between the mountainous pastoral and lowland farming regions allowed not only to feed their population, but also to allow the representatives of the religious monophysite sect persecuted in the Orthodox Roman (Roman Empire), known as the Armenian Gregorians, to "root" among them. Ethnically this sect included not only representatives of the Hays ethnic group, but also groups of Kurdish, Albanian, Turkic and other origin. Turks have lived on these territories, which are now claimed by Armenian nationalists, for centuries. So were the ancestors of the Kurds, whom Armenian nationalists (while denying the presence of a Turkic population in ancient times) nevertheless grudgingly recognise as an "ancient people" in order to support the Kurdish separatists.

Yes, the Kurds do not deny that their ancestors engaged in nomadic herding. And as we have shown above, this way of life was then very economically efficient. But the Kurds do not have even a thousandth of the vast number of artefacts and "writings" that Armenian historians claim to be "ancient".

From the standpoint of trivial logic, this is inexplicable. Well, it is impossible that two peoples lived side by side on the peripheries of empires, but one was "exceptionally savage and backward" for centuries, and the other was "supercultural", although it is banal that the second had less opportunities to "feed its cultural figures" than the first.

Whereas, if the "ancient and cultured" made up their own writings in later times, having incorporated their own mythologised history into them, and some of them simply stole and appropriated someone else's, then everything falls into place. Any history can be made up retrospectively, any artefacts can be falsified under it. All the more so from the point of view of objective economic laws, the very existence of such artefacts is suspect.

Kavkazplus