{"id":25915,"date":"2015-03-17T12:32:24","date_gmt":"2015-03-17T11:32:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/norkhosq.net\/?p=25915"},"modified":"2015-03-17T15:07:39","modified_gmt":"2015-03-17T14:07:39","slug":"date-of-armenia%e2%80%99s-birth-given-in-5th-century-gains-credence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/norkhosq.net\/?p=25915","title":{"rendered":"Date of Armenia\u2019s Birth, Given in 5th Century, Gains Credence"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/03\/11\/science\/study-backs-5th-century-historians-date-for-founding-of-armenia.html?smid=tw-share\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" style=\"border: 0px none;\" src=\"http:\/\/a1.nyt.com\/assets\/homepage\/20150316-110756\/images\/foundation\/logos\/nyt-logo-379x64.png\" border=\"0\" alt=\"The New York Times\" width=\"137\" height=\"23\" \/><\/a> &#8211;\u00a0 By <a title=\"More Articles by NICHOLAS WADE\" rel=\"author\" href=\"http:\/\/topics.nytimes.com\/top\/reference\/timestopics\/people\/w\/nicholas_wade\/index.html\">NICHOLAS WADE<\/a><\/p>\n<p id=\"story-continues-1\" style=\"text-align: left;\">Movses Khorenatsi, a historian in the fifth century, wrote that his native <a title=\"More news and information about Armenia.\" href=\"http:\/\/topics.nytimes.com\/top\/news\/international\/countriesandterritories\/armenia\/index.html?inline=nyt-geo\">Armenia<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">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\u2019s date for the  founding of Armenia.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/03\/11\/science\/study-backs-5th-century-historians-date-for-founding-of-armenia.html?_r=0#story-continues-2\">Continue reading the main story<\/a>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h4>Related Coverage<\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/03\/10\/world\/middleeast\/armenian-leaders-establish-rights-award-to-commemorate-centenary-of-genocide.html\"><br \/>\n<h4>Armenian Leaders Establish Rights Award to Commemorate Centenary of Genocide MARCH 10, 2015<\/h4>\n<p><\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/03\/10\/world\/middleeast\/armenian-leaders-establish-rights-award-to-commemorate-centenary-of-genocide.html\"><\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/03\/10\/world\/middleeast\/armenian-leaders-establish-rights-award-to-commemorate-centenary-of-genocide.html\"><\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p id=\"story-continues-2\" style=\"text-align: left;\">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.<\/p>\n<p id=\"story-continues-3\" style=\"text-align: left;\">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.<\/p>\n<p id=\"story-continues-4\" style=\"text-align: left;\">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.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">\u201cThis  DNA study confirms in general outline much of what we know about  Armenian history,\u201d said Hovann Simonian, a historian of Armenia  affiliated with the <a title=\"More articles about University of Southern California\" href=\"http:\/\/topics.nytimes.com\/top\/reference\/timestopics\/organizations\/u\/university_of_southern_california\/index.html?inline=nyt-org\">University of Southern California<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p id=\"story-continues-5\" style=\"text-align: left;\">The  geneticists\u2019 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.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">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 <a title=\"More articles about Palestinians.\" href=\"http:\/\/topics.nytimes.com\/top\/reference\/timestopics\/subjects\/p\/palestinians\/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier\">Palestinians<\/a>,  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.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">The geneticists\u2019 <a href=\"http:\/\/biorxiv.org\/content\/early\/2015\/02\/18\/015396\">paper<\/a> was posted last month on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.biorxiv.org\">bioRxiv<\/a>,  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.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/03\/11\/science\/study-backs-5th-century-historians-date-for-founding-of-armenia.html?smid=tw-share\">www.nytimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8211;\u00a0 By NICHOLAS WADE 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&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/norkhosq.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/norkhosq.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/norkhosq.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/norkhosq.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/norkhosq.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25915"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/norkhosq.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25915\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25918,"href":"https:\/\/norkhosq.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25915\/revisions\/25918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/norkhosq.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/norkhosq.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/norkhosq.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}