Armenian literature

Origins and golden age

There is evidence that a pagan oral literature existed in Armenia before the invention of the Armenian alphabet in the 5th century ce, but, owing to the zeal of the early Christian priests, little of this was preserved. For about a century after their conversion to Christianity (c. 300), the Armenians had to rely on Greek and Syriac versions of the Bible and other religious books. These languages were unintelligible to the common people, and to remedy this Mesrop Mashtots invented, with the help of others, the Armenian alphabet in 405, according to tradition. The catholicos Isaac (Sahak) the Great and Mesrop formed a school of translators who were reputedly sent to Edessa and to Constantinople to procure and translate Syriac and Greek copies of important works into Armenian.

Much of the literary activity of the 5th century—the golden age of Armenian literature—was devoted to such translations. Original works, however, were not wanting, such as the histories of Eghishe and Ghazar of Pharp. The masterpiece of classical Armenian writing is the “Refutation of the Sects” by Eznik Koghbatsi. This was a polemical work, composed partly from Greek sources, in defense of orthodox Christian belief against—and thereby providing valuable information about—pagan Armenian superstitions, Iranian dualism, Greek philosophy, and the Marcionite heresy. Its pure classical style is unsurpassed in Armenian literature. The work of translating such authors as Saints John Chrysostom and Cyril of Alexandria continued in the 6th–8th century. The so-called Hellenistic (Yunaban) school produced excessively slavish translations from Greek grammatical, theological, and philosophical works, including those of Plato, Aristotle, and Philo of Alexandria.

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Medieval decline

In the 10th and 11th centuries, which witnessed the maturity of the independent Bagratid kingdom of Armenia, the Artsruni kingdom of Vaspurakan, and the kingdom of Siuniq, Armenian literature, art, and architecture flourished more freely than at any time since the 5th century. The principal literary figure of the 10th century was St. Gregory Narekatzi, the first great Armenian poet, renowned for his mystic poems and hymns as well as for such prose works as the Commentary on the Song of Songs. Earlier in the same century, Thomas (Thovma) Artsruni wrote History of the House of Artsruni, which, in spite of its family bias, is the chief source of information on the history of Armenia to 936; an anonymous writer continued the work to 1121. The History of Armenia by the catholicos (patriarch) John VI Draskhanakertzi is of great value for its account of Arab relations with Armenia, for the author was himself an important participant in the later events he describes. At the turn of the 10th to the 11th century, Bishop Ukhtanes wrote History of Armenia and History of the Schism Between the Georgians and Armenians. The beginning of the 11th century saw the completion of the reliable and well-written Universal History of Stephanos Asoghik. The History of Armenia by Aristakes Lastivertzi, relating the fall of the Bagratid kingdom (1045), the destruction of Ani (1064), and the victories of the Seljuq Turks, is almost as much a prose elegy as a history.

After the political collapse of Greater Armenia (c. 1100) and the consequent shift southward of the cultural centre to Little, or Cilician, Armenia, the literature split into a western and an eastern branch. In both branches authors began to write in the spoken as well as the classical language. The Mamluk invasion of 1375 and the invasion by Timur (Tamerlane) in 1385 ushered in a long period of cultural and literary decline.

There were signs in the 17th century that the Armenians were emerging from the cultural decline of the preceding centuries. The deeds of Turkish and Persian overlords figured prominently in histories by Araqel of Tabriz and Zaqaria the Deacon, but there was some contact with Western scholars and works in Latin. Oskan of Erevan (born in 1614 in the newly founded trading colony of New Julfa, Eṣfahān) collaborated with the Dominican Pirandelli and printed the first Armenian Bible in Amsterdam in 1666. From the 13th century, imaginative writing had been represented by a succession of popular troubadours, the most famous of these being Nahapet Kuchak (16th century), one of the rare Armenian poets to sing of physical love; Hovnatan Naghash (1661–1722); and in the 18th century, most famous of all, Aruthin Sayadian, called Sayat-Nova.