Download PDF | Armenia in the Period of Justinian: The Political Conditions Based on the Naxarar System, By Nicholas Adontz, Lisbon 1970.
529 Pages
EDITOR’S PREFACE
For more than half a century since its publication in 1908, Nicholas Adontz’s monumental thesis on Armenia in the Period of Justinian has proved to be both a landmark and a guidepost in the field of Armenian studies although its general inaccessibility, either from the rarity of procurable copies, or from linguistic difficulties, has made of it far too often a semi-legendary document rather than a useful tool, Perhaps as the result of this fortuitous isolation as well as of external circumstances, Adontz’s first and probably greatest work did not lead to an immediate proliferation of studies along the lines that he had traced.
He, himself, was to develop a number of them in later works such as his articles on the Armenian Primary History, Mesrop Ma8st’oc, Koriwn, P’awstos Buzand, and Movsés Xorenaci; on the date of the Christianization of Armenia; on the Iranian aspects of Armenian society ; and, as late as his postumously published History, on pre-Achaemenid Armenia}, But it is only relatively recently that the works of such distinguished contemporary armenologists as Gérard Garitte, Cyril Toumanoff, and the late Hakob Manandian have developed a number of problems in mediaeval Armenian history significantly beyond the point reached by Adontz at the turn of the century, and these scholars have not failed to acknowledge their indebtedness even where they have outstripped him?
Not even a Marxist presentation which of necessity challenged many of Adontz’s premises and interpretations prevented A.G. Sukiasian from admitting that ‘‘... the admirable work of N. Adontz ... remains to this day one of the most authoritative works on Armenian feudalism”, Such tributes are all the more impressive if we remember that they are addressed to the first major work of a young scholar composed at a time when a number of crucial studies on Late-Roman, Byzantine, and Iranian history as well as on the historical geography of eastern Anatolia were still to be written,
The scope of Adontz’s encyclopaedic work is not conveyed adequately by even a full quotation of his title, since, far from restricting himself to the reign of Justinian, or to an investigation of the nayarar system, he went on to scrutinize nearly every aspect of ancient and mediaeval Armenia — geographical, political, religious, administrative, social, and intellectual — while giving simultaneously an extensive analysis of all the available sources. Perhaps the clearest index of the breadth of Adontz’s information is the all too clear incompetence of a single individual to edit his work; a team of specialists — historians, geographers, archaeologists, philologists, anthropologists, and ethnographers — would have been necessary to do it justice.
The value of Adontz’s work for a new generation of scholars 15 not, however, limited to being a source of rare information to be exploited for reference; his methods and insights into the crucial problems of early Armenian history may yet prove more useful than even the enormous material accumulated by him. His application of critical scholarly methods to Armenian studies, and particularly his recognition of the dangers inherent in purely literary sources, have led to considerable work on the re-evaluation and re-dating of many Armenian historical documents, a task in which he continued to participate energetically, and which is by no means completed. His simultaneous use of the techniques of varied disciplines while stressing the maintenance of the historian’s rigorous chronological criterion, and his comparative method of juxtaposing the information of all relevant sources, Classical, Armenian, and Oriental, provided a workable blueprint for attacking the difficulties characterizing Armenian historiography. His ground breaking qualitative and quantitative analyses of Armenian social structure, reaching beyond superficial generalities, provided us with some of the first detailed information and with a framework for further research.
Particularly iJumimating is Adontz’s constant refusal to be led astray by the conscious or implicit assumptions of his sources that ancient Armenia was a simple, undifferentiated, and unchanging entity, rather than the complicated aggregation of varied components whose geographic, political, and even religious particularism must be recognized even in periods of seeming unification, and whose characteristics and interests must be accounted for and balanced anew in each successive period. On numerous occasions Adontz’s hypotheses have required development or rectification, but his basic conclusions repeatedly reached beyond the theses then current to what would prove to be the crux of a problem: beyond the familar division of Armenia between the Graeco-Roman and Iranian worlds to the paramount importance of the elaborate nexus of family traditions and loyalities, ‘ dynastic’ as well as “feudal”, as shown in Toumanoff’s recent Studies; beyond the double strain of Armenian Christianity, Syriac as well as Hellenic, to the relationship of the ecclesiastical hierarchy to the nayarar structure, and its influence on the political evolution of the country, as I hope to demonstrate in a forthcoming work. Professor Garitte already observed the value of Adontz’s inspired guesses when his own publication of the new Greek version of the Life of St. Gregory repeatedly vindicated Adontz’s hypothetical corrections of Marr’s readings in the Arabic version's.
It is self evident that a book written more than sixty years ago should now be superseded in a number of instances: Armenian archaeology was all but non-existent at the time, so that the Urartian aspects of Armenian history were perforce ignored, though Adontz himself rectified a considerable part of this lacuna in his Histoire d’ Arménie; new epigraphic material both in: Armenia and in Iran has added significantly to our knowledge of both countries, and new editions of Iranian texts have altered a number of etymological derivations ; the Erwandian-Orontid dynasty identified by Manandian 5 has altered radically our knowledge of the Hellenistic period; the lengthy survey of Diocletian’s administrative reforms while perhaps still useful to Adontz’s Russian contemporaries, now seems superfluous ; and a number of his conclusions as to the «feudal» nature of the Armenian nazarar system rest on antiquated enter preusuOns of European feu-dahsm.
The entire book bears the marks of hasty publication, whether’i m the more superficial details of faulty proofreading, insufficient and often exasperatingly inadequate references, as well as the absence - of the indispensable map, whose omission was regretted by the author, or in the far more fundamental aspects of occasionally confused, repetitive and contradictory organization, dubious etymologies, overstatements, and premature conclusions. The involutions of Adontz’s style in a language not native to him add nothing to the clarity of the presentation.
Yet Adontz himself anticipated much of the criticism which must attend a pioneer venture by disclaiming any pretension to a definitive study. “... in publishing this work we are very far from any illusion as to its perfection. Armenian philology is still at a stage where the presentation of any interpretation or theory as unchallengeably correct is out of the question. Students of Armenian antiquity can only grope their way toward many historical problems by way of more or less successful hypotheses; some of these may be corroborated at a later date, others will fall by the way. .... Our clarification of the nayarar systema should bring a ray of hght into the darkness which hangs over the Armenian past ... and should prove a starting point for a scholarly analysis of the extensive subsequent period of Armenian history ...”? ®& On these terms, the value of his work has diminished but little in the intervening half-century, notwithstanding the necessary alterations. Τὺ remains a mine of information for the specialist, and a source of seminal ideas for those re-interpretations and further investigations the author had requested. As such it is a fitting reminder that in every generation it behoves dwarfs to take advantage of the shoulders of the giants who have preceded them.
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The instinct of every translator running the ominous gaunilet between the Charybdis of inaccuracy and the Scylla of unreadabihty is to open with his own apologia. This temptation is all the stronger in the case of Armenia wm the Perrod of Justinian, since, as I have already indicated, Russian was not Adontz’s native language. Unlike Armenian, which has three steps in the demonstrative-relative system (hic, iste, alle), Russian shares with most European languages a two step system. As a consequence of Adontz’s shift from the one to the other, his writing abounds with cases of ambiguous antecedents, not all of which can readily be resolved from the context, His complicated and often awkward sentence structure is particularly foreign to Enghsh usage; the paragraphing is often erratic. Nevertheless the text has been consistently respected, and alterations held down to a minimum even where some awkwardness ensued. Aside from the introduction of occasional elucidations such as “ Xosrov I of Armenia” for “ Xosrov”’, the subdivision of unmanageable sentences, the clarification of antecedents, and the correction of minor misprints, no liberties have been taken with the original.
The only significant difference between this edition and the Russian one hes in the realm of quotations from primary sources. Following the fashion of the day, Adontz often gave lengthy paraphrases rather than direct quotations. In several instances where this method seemed awkward or unnecessary, the original quotation has been re-introduced, each case being duly recorded in the notes. To facilitate the reading, all extensive quotations in foreign languages have been shifted from the text to the notes and replaced by their English translations. Since so much of the value of Adontz’s work hes in his vast collection of sources, many of which still remain extremely scarce even for the specialist, it has seemed useful to include in the notes the texts of a number of passages to which Adontz merely referred, all such additions being set off by square brackets. Furthermore, a series of Appendices containing 7m extenso, or in their relevant portions, the main documents, Classical and Armenian, used by Adontz, has been added to this edition to allow the reader to draw his own conclusions from the material.
In many instances the editions used by Adontz were either superseded or, in the case of some Armenian documents, unobtainable; these have been replaced by more recent or accessible ones. All such substitutions have been noted in the Bibliography. Similarly, the English versions of Classical sources found in the Loeb Classical Inbrary have been used wherever possible for the sake of convenience, but any significant differences between their translations and the ones given by Adontz have been recorded. Additional notes by the editor are indicated by letters as well as numbers eg. la.
A full scale re-edition of Adontz’s book to bring its manifold aspects im line with their modern scholarship would have entailed a major re-writing of the book, and would consequently le well beyond the scope of this edition and the competence of its editor. Consequently it has seemed best to leave Adontz’s text substantially as he composed it, adding only, wherever possible, some indication in the notes as to the agreement or disagreement of subsequent investigators, new material, need for rectification, or corroborative evidence. The new Bibliographical Note attempts to provide some, albeit cursory, indication of the relevant works published since 1908. Finally, it is hoped that the Bibliography, which follows Adontz’s lead in reaching beyond the lhmits of Justinianic Armenia to include a number of problems imphleit or explicit in his text, will provide still more comparative material and criteria for a further re-evaluation of some of his conclus10nS,
All those who have had the occasion to experience it will readily recognize the eternal nightmare of inconsistency in transliteration, especially in the case of proper names which have reached us in multiple versions. In the kaleidoscopic world of eastern Asia Minor is a locality to be identified: by its Classical, Armenian, Persian, Syriac, Arabic, or Turkish name? Which is the preferable transliteration system to be used for the name of an author writing both in Armenian and in Russian? The most that this edition can hope to claim is an attempt to bring a little order into what can only be called Adontz’s systematic inconsistency.
Wherever possible, Armenian terms have been given according to the prevailing Hiibschmann-Meillet system, Arabic ones according to the spelling of the Encyclopedia of Islam, the Persian ones according to Christensen’s L’ Ivan sous les Sassanides, 2nd edition (Copenhagen, 1944) with minor alterations, Russian ones according to the system of the U.S. Library of Congress, Georgian ones according to Toumanoft’s Studies in Christian Caucasian History (Georgetown, 1963), and Turkish toponyms according to the Office of Geography, .Department of the Interior, Gazetieer No. 46: Turkey (Washington, 1960). Hor the sake of convenience, author’s names have been given a single form, e.g. Manandian, irrespective of the alterations required by the diverse languages in which they wrote, the form selected being wherever possible the one more generally familiar. In all cases of ambiguity alternate versions have been given. For Armenian toponyms, the Armenian form has generally been preferred for localities in Persarmenia, and the Classical (preferably Greek rather than Latin) for the western section of the country which was part of the Eastern Roman Empire, except in the case of familiar names where such a procedure would entail unwarranted pedantry. Tor all the occasions on which these guide lines have failed, as they needs must, I can only appeal to the sympathetic indulgence of my colleagues.
The precious geographical sections of the book carry their own particular series of problems. The map envisaged by Adontz was never published, and nearly every locality in eastern Anatolia has experienced at least one name change since 1908. Consequently Kiepert’s and Lynch’s maps to which Adontz normally refers are of | but limited value to the modern reader, sincé no concordance of earlier and contemporary names exists to my knowledge. The identification of many ancient sites remains controversial in spite of the extensive investigations of Markwart, Honigmann, Eremyan, and many others. In Appendix V some attempt has been made to coordinate the information on toponyms, giving where relevant and possible their ancient Classical and/or Armenian name, the modern equivalent, the coordinates given in the U.S. Office of Geography, Gazetieer No, 46, and a reference to the appropriate sheet of the USAF Aeronautical Approach Chart (St. Louis, 1956-1958) and the Turkish General Map. Where this has proved impossible, the available information will be found in the relevant notes. |
Finally, I should lke to express my thanks to my imends and colleagues, professors Seeger Bonebakker, Associate Professor of Arabic Studies, Tibor Halasi-Kun, Professor of Turkic Studies, Karl H. Menges, Professor of Altaic Philology, and Ehsan Yar-Shater, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies, all of Columbia University, aS well as professors Gérard EH. Caspary, Associate Professor of Mediaeval History at Smith College, Wendell 8. Johnson, Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of the City of New York, and Norma A. Phillips, Assistant Professor of Enghsh Literature at Queens College of the City of New York, for their help and patience on the many occasions when I was forced to turn to them for assistance. 1 am most grateful to Professor Emeritus Sirarpie der Nersessian of the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, both for her suggestion that I undertake this edition and for the help and encouragement she has so often given me. To my constant advantage, I have also benefited from the vast knowledge and inexhaustible kindness of Monsieur Haig Bérbérian of the Revue des Hiudes Armémiennes. Finally, my thanks are also due to Dr. Robert Hewsen for his help with questions of Armenian geography, and to my students Dr. Linda Rose, Messers, Krikor Maksoudian and Jack Vartoogian for the endless hours they spent in the thankless tasks of verifying references, hunting out copies of rare works, and proofreading. For the many flaws which such an edition must perforce still contain, the responsibility remains of course mine alone. |
| | Nina G. Garsoian. New York, July 3, 1967.
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