Study Backs 5th-Century Historian’s Date for Founding of Armenia
By NICHOLAS WADE
March 10, 2015
Movses Khorenatsi, a historian in the fifth century, wrote that his native
Armenia had been established in 2492 B.C., a date usually regarded as
legendary though he claimed to have traveled to Babylon and consulted
ancient records. But either he made a lucky guess or he really did gain
access to useful data, because a new genomic analysis suggests that his
date is entirely plausible.
Geneticists have scanned the genomes of 173 Armenians from Armenia and
Lebanon and compared them with those of 78 other populations from around
the world. They found that the Armenians are a mix of ancient populations
whose descendants now live in Sardinia, Central Asia and several other
regions. This formative mixture occurred from 3000 to 2000 B.C., the
geneticists calculated, coincident with Movses Khorenatsi’s date for the
founding of Armenia.
Toward the end of the Bronze Age, when the mixture was in process, there
was considerable movement of peoples brought about by increased trade,
warfare and population growth. After 1200 B.C., the Bronze Age
civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean suddenly collapsed, an event
that seems to have brought about the isolation of Armenians from other
populations. No significant mixing with other peoples after that date can
be detected in the genomes of living Armenians, the geneticists said.
The isolation was probably sustained by the many characteristic aspects of
Armenian culture. Armenians have a distinctive language and alphabet, and
the Armenian Apostolic Church was the first branch of Christianity to
become established as a state religion, in A.D. 301, anticipating that by
the Roman empire in A.D. 380.
The researchers also see a signal of genetic divergence that developed
about 500 years ago between western and eastern Armenians. The date
corresponds to the onset of wars between the Ottoman and Safavid dynasties
and the division of the Armenian population between the Turkish and Persian
empires.
`This DNA study confirms in general outline much of what we know about
Armenian history,’ said Hovann Simonian, a historian of Armenia affiliated
with the University of Southern California
.
The geneticists’ team, led by Marc Haber and Chris Tyler-Smith of the
Sanger Institute, near Cambridge in England, see long-isolated populations
like that of the Armenians as a means of reconstructing population history.
Armenians share 29 percent of their DNA ancestry with Otzi, a man whose
5,300-year-old mummy emerged in 1991 from a melting Alpine glacier. Other
genetically isolated populations of the Near East, like Cypriots, Sephardic
Jews and Lebanese Christians, also share a lot of ancestry with the Iceman,
whereas other Near Easterners, like Turks, Syrians and Palestinians
,
share less. This indicates that the Armenians and other isolated
populations are closer than present-day inhabitants of the Near East to the
Neolithic farmers who brought agriculture to Europe about 8,000 years ago.
The geneticists’ paper
was posted last month on bioRxiv , a digital
library for publishing scientific articles before they appear in journals.
Dr. Tyler-Smith, the senior author of the genetics team, said he could not
discuss their results for fear of jeopardizing publication in a journal
that he did not name.
From: A. Papazian