Bert Vaux (University of Cambridge)

Artsakh (Classical Armenian Artsʻakh, Արցախ) was the tenth of the fifteen provinces of Greater Armenia enumerated in the seventh-century Armenian Geography (Ashkharhatsʻoytsʻ), lying between Siwnikʻ and Utikʻ, the latter separating it from the river Kura. The name is attested in Armenian from the fifth century, when the Epic Histories attributed to Pʻawstos Buzand record it in the variant Ardzakh (Արձախ), and Eghishē’s History of Vardan and the Armenian War in both forms (see below); further medieval forms such as Ardakh and Artsʻakhamar ashkharh are collected in the standard Dictionary of Toponyms of Armenia and Adjacent Regions (Hakobyan et al. 1986). In the eighth century the grammarian Stepʻannos Siwnetsʻi already names an ‘Artsakh’ (Artsʻakhayin) dialect among the peripheral varieties of Armenian. Its ultimate origin, however, remains one of the unresolved problems of Armenian toponymy (Hübschmann 1904: 267 = 1907: 102).

Early attestations

The earliest Armenian attestations have been assembled by Martirosyan (2016). Pʻawstos Buzand twice uses the genitive Ardzakhay: the ‘strong district of Ardzakh’ is said to have rebelled against King Arshak (Apstambetsʻin yArshakay arkʻayēn Hayotsʻ amur gawaṙn Ardzakhay, 4.50), and the land of Ardzakh is later subdued ‘with a great war’ (Harkanēr zerkirn Ardzakhay metsaw paterazmaw, 5.12; Pʻawstos 1883 [1984]: 135, 176). Eghishē mentions the province three times (Eghishē 1989: 190–191, 252–253, 256–257), twice in connection with its forests: yArtsʻakh (manuscript variants yArdzakh, yArtsʻakhn, yArdzaghn); i tʻandzrakhit mayrisn Ardzakhoy ‘in the dense forests of Ardzakh’ (variants Ardzakhatsʻ, Ardzakha, Artsʻakhu, Artsʻakhoy); and yArdzakhay mayrisn ‘into the forests of Ardzakh’ (variant yArtsakha). Both the long and the short recensions of the Geography (Ashkharhatsʻoytsʻ) have Artsʻakh, genitive Artsʻakhay. The one apparent instance of Ardzakhay in Soukry’s edition (1881: 33) is a misprint: the manuscript facsimile clearly reads Arts‘akhay [Արցախայ] (Hewsen 1994: 51, last line). The form Artsʻakh is also found in Movsēs Kaghankatvatsʻi’s History of the Caucasian Albanians and in later authors.

Proposed etymologies

The Greek historian and geographer of the 1st centry BC Strabo (Geography 11.14.4) mentions an Armenian district called Orchistene (Gk. Ὀρχιστηνή), which, he reports, supplied the largest contingent of cavalry; this is usually regarded as a Greek rendering of the same name, an identification the Dictionary of Toponyms accepts. Several Armenian historians have gone further, identifying Artsakh with the lands called Urteḫe or Urteḫini (and, in some readings, Ardaḫ and Ataḫuni) in the inscriptions of the eighth-century BC kings of Urartu. Hovhannes Karagyozyan (1998), for instance, derives Artsʻakh/Ardzakh from Urteḫe, with Urartian ḫ reflected as Armenian kh. Martirosyan (2014: 240, 242) leaves open whether this correspondence is acceptable, but notes that Karagyozyan treats the same Urartian sounds differently elsewhere: in deriving Gugarkʻ from Urartian Uiṭeruḫi he assumes ṭ > g and ḫ > kʻ, whereas Urteḫe > Artsʻakh would require ṭ > tsʻ/dz and ḫ > kh. This equation is far from secure. Diakonoff and Kashkai (1981) interpret Urteḫini as an inflected form of Urte, locate it near the south-eastern shore of Lake Sevan, and suggest that it may denote a mountain rather than a region, while the Dictionary of Toponyms dismisses as unlikely the equation of Artsakh with the Urdukhe and Atakhani of the cuneiform texts.

A popular tradition divides the name into Ar-, taken to refer to Aran, the legendary ancestor of the region’s princes, and tsʻakh ‘brushwood, thicket’, yielding ‘the woods of Aran’. The nineteenth-century scholar Ghewond Alishan cautiously derived the name from tsʻakh alone, in allusion to the heavily forested landscape (Alishan 1993) – a landscape to which Eghishē’s ‘dense forests of Ardzakh’ already bear witness. David M. Lang (1988) connected it with Artashēs (Greek Artaxias) I, who incorporated the region into the Armenian kingdom in the early second century BC. Taking the Urartian and Greek forms at face value, Babken Harutʻyunyan (1994) posited an original initial o-, on which basis Lusine Margaryan (2020) has proposed *Ortʻs-akh ‘place of vines’, from Armenian ortʻ ‘vine’ and a Hurro-Urartian place-name suffix; Margaryan also reviews a derivation from a root ardz- ‘rocky, mountainous’. Slava Sargsyan (1996) analyses the name as *ar- + *-di ‘much’ + *akh ‘water’, i.e. ‘abundant in water’, an interpretation Martirosyan (2016) rejects as without foundation.

Most recently, Martirosyan (2016; pers. comm.) has argued that Artsʻakh/Ardzakh is an Iranian loanword, comparing the Manichaean Middle Persian place name Arzax (written ’rzx), the name of the eastern kišwar or ‘clime’, one of the regions into which the Iranian tradition divided the world (Henning 1977: II, 28–29 [orig. 1940]; MacKenzie 1971: 11; Nyberg 1974: 30b, 118–119; Durkin-Meisterernst 2004: 53b). The phonological correspondence is regular: Iranian rz is reflected as Armenian rdz, as in ardzak ‘free, loose’ (ardzakel ‘to release’), borrowed from the Iranian root seen in Avestan harəz- and Parthian hyrz ‘to release, let go’ (Acharyan 1971–1979, I: 324–325; Bolognesi 1960: 50–51; Jahukyan 1987: 517; 2010: 92b; Olsen 1999: 252). On this view the form Ardzakh, which predominates in the earliest sources, would be the more original, and Artsʻakh a secondary variant with the devoicing and aspiration of stops and affricates commonly found in Armenian varieties across time and space.

Assessment

None of the earlier proposals satisfy the criteria that Hrach Martirosyan (2010; 2022) has formulated for the etymology of opaque Armenian place names: reliable early attestation, independent confirmation in cuneiform sources, an underlying appellative of secure origin, and semantics appropriate to the place concerned. The Aran/tsʻakh analysis bears all the hallmarks of folk etymology; the derivation from Artashēs cannot be reconciled with the Armenian form of the king’s name; the ‘vine’ hypothesis rests both on the contested Urartian identification and on an unexplained vowel change; and the ‘abundant in water’ analysis is, as Martirosyan (2016) observes, arbitrary. The fluctuation between -tsʻ- and -dz- in the earliest Armenian spellings – Pʻawstos has only Ardzakh, while the manuscripts of Eghishē waver between the two – together with the divergent Greek form, may indicate that the name was already unanalysable for Armenian speakers in antiquity, and possibly of pre-Armenian origin. Martirosyan’s Iranian etymology offers an explanation of these same facts: if the name was borrowed from Iranian Arzax, the -dz- forms continue the regular Armenian reflex of Iranian rz, and the absence of a native Armenian analysis is expected. The proposal rests on early attestation and a regular sound correspondence with an attested source form, although the semantic link between the name of a cosmographic clime and that of an Armenian frontier province, and the historical circumstances of the borrowing, remain to be clarified. Martirosyan’s studies of the toponymy of Artsakh and Syunik have demonstrated the Armenian origin of a great many local place names; the name of the province itself, however, has resisted a convincing universally accepted explanation. What is beyond dispute is that it has been in continuous Armenian use for more than fifteen centuries.

Bibliography

Sources

Eghishē, Վասն Վարդանայ եւ Հայոց պատերազմին [On Vardan and the Armenian War], critical text E. Tēr-Minasean, Modern Armenian trans. P. Ananyan, Erevan: State University Press 1989.

Garsoïan, N. G. (trans.), The Epic Histories Attributed to Pʻawstos Buzand (Buzandaran Patmutʻiwnkʻ), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1989.

Hewsen, R. H. (trans.), The Geography of Ananias of Širak (Ašxarhacʻoycʻ): The Long and the Short Recensions (Beihefte zum Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients, Reihe B 77), Wiesbaden: Reichert 1992.

Hewsen, R. H. (intro.), Ashkharhatsoyts = Ašxarhacʻoycʻ: The Seventh Century Geography, Attributed to Ananias of Shirak, facsimile ed., Delmar, NY: Caravan Books 1994. [Reproduces Soukry’s 1881 Venice edition of the long recension, the text of the unique Venice manuscript on which it was based, and the 1944 Erevan edition of the short recension.]

Pʻawstos Buzand, Պատմութիւն Հայոց [History of the Armenians], Venice: Mekhitarist Press 1883; repr. Delmar, NY: Caravan Books 1984.

Soukry, A. (ed.), Géographie de Moïse de Corène d’après Ptolémée, Venice: Imprimerie Arménienne 1881.

Strabo, Geography, vol. 5 (Books 10-12), trans. H. L. Jones (Loeb Classical Library 211), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1928.

Research literature

Acharyan, H., Հայերեն արմատական բառարան [Armenian etymological dictionary], 2nd ed., 4 vols, Erevan: State University Press 1971–1979.

Alishan, Gh., Արցախ, trans. G. Tʻosunyan, Erevan: State University Press 1993.

Bolognesi, G., Le fonti dialettali degli imprestiti iranici in armeno, Milan: Vita e Pensiero 1960.

Diakonoff, I. M. – Kashkai, S. M., Geographical Names According to Urartian Texts (Répertoire Géographique des Textes Cunéiformes 9), Wiesbaden: Reichert 1981.

Durkin-Meisterernst, D., Dictionary of Manichaean Middle Persian and Parthian (Dictionary of Manichaean Texts III/1), Turnhout: Brepols 2004.

Hakobyan, Tʻ. Kh. – Melikʻ-Bakhshyan, St. T. – Barseghyan, H. Kh., Հայաստանի եվ հարակից շրջանների տեղանունների բառարան [Dictionary of toponyms of Armenia and adjacent regions], vol. 1, Erevan: State University Press 1986.

Harutʻyunyan, B. H., “Արցախի, Հայոց Արեվելից կողմերի եվ Ղարաբաղի տարածքի հարցի շուրջը” [On the question of the territory of Artsakh, the Eastern Regions of Armenia, and Karabakh], Patma-banasirakan handes 1994/1-2, p. 265ff.

Henning, W. B., Selected Papers, 2 vols (Acta Iranica 14–15), Leiden: Brill; Tehran – Liège: Bibliothèque Pahlavi 1977.

Hewsen, R. H., Armenia: A Historical Atlas, Chicago – London: University of Chicago Press 2001.

Hübschmann, H., Die altarmenischen Ortsnamen, Strassburg: Trübner 1904. Armenian trans.: Հին Հայոց տեղւոյ անունները [Places names of ancient Armenia], Vienna: Mekhitarist Press 1907.

Jahukyan, G. B., Հայոց լեզուի պատմություն. նախագրային ժամանակաշրջան [History of the Armenian language: the pre-literary period], Erevan: Academy of Sciences of Armenia 1987.

Jahukyan, G. B., Հայերեն ստուգաբանական բառարան [Armenian etymological dictionary], Erevan: Asoghik 2010.

Karagyozyan, H., Սեպագիր տեղանուններ (Այրարատում եվ հարակից նահանգներում) [Cuneiform place names (in Ayrarat and the adjacent provinces)] (Հայկական լեռնաշխարհը սեպագիր աղբյուրներում I.1), Erevan: Magaghatʻ 1998.

Lang, D. M., The Armenians: A People in Exile, London: Unwin Hyman 1988.

MacKenzie, D. N., A Concise Pahlavi Dictionary, London: Oxford University Press 1971.

Margaryan, L., “‘Արցախ եվ ‘Ղարաբաղ’ տեղանունների ստուգաբանության հարցի շուրջ” [On the etymology of the place names Artsakh and Karabakh], Banber Matenadarani 29 (2020), p. 349ff.

Martirosyan, H., Etymological Dictionary of the Armenian Inherited Lexicon (Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 8), Leiden – Boston: Brill 2010.

Martirosyan, H., “Համեմատական լեզվաբանության եվ պատմագիտության խաչմերուկներում (Հովհաննես Կարագյույանի աշխատանքների առնչությամբ)” [At the crossroads of comparative linguistics and history (on the studies of Hovhannes Karagyozyan)], in A. Piliposyan (ed.), Բ. Բ. Պիոտրովսկին եվ հնագիտությունը [B. B. Piotrovsky and archaeology: collected articles dedicated to the memory of Boris Piotrovsky], Erevan 2014, pp. 238–258.

Martirosyan, H., “Արցախի տեղանունը” [The place name Artsakh], handout, Vienna, 8 July 2016. https://www.academia.edu/88830013/Arjax_2016_handout

Martirosyan, H., “Place Names in Artsakh/Gharabagh, Syunik, and Surroundings”, unpublished manuscript, Leiden 2022.

Nyberg, H. S., A Manual of Pahlavi, vol. 2: Ideograms, Glossary, Abbreviations, Index, Grammatical Survey, Corrigenda to Part I, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 1974.

Olsen, B. A., The Noun in Biblical Armenian: Origin and Word-Formation, Berlin – New York: Mouton de Gruyter 1999.

Sargsyan, S., Արցախ, Erevan: Hay Ēditʻ 1996.