Our Notes & References

The first edition of a seminal work with extensive summaries of the primary historical chronicles of Armenia, Georgia, and “Caucasian Albania” (Azerbaijan), complemented with copious scholarly notes and linguistic analysis.

Ivan Ivanovich Shopen (1798-1870) was a Russian ethnographer and statesman of French origin, tasked with documenting the population of Armenia upon its incorporation into the Russian Empire in 1828. A statistician by training, Shopen in these New Notes, his last book, engaged instead in history and philology of the entire region, reflecting a love of and fascination with the Caucasus and its people.

His source material includes the Georgian Chronicles and the History of the Armenians by Moses Khorenatsi, both of which are famous records of foundation myths and the great deeds of ancient and medieval kings.

Moses Khorenatsi is particularly noteworthy for being the “father of Armenian history” (patmahayr) in Armenian, and is sometimes referred to as the “Armenian Herodotus” (Chahin). Shopen provides detailed, chapter-by-chapter summaries and annotated each chronicle profusely with a wide range of remarks that are mainly philological, but also mythological and historical, sometimes much longer than the chronicle’s extract — at several points he attempts to create a concordance between the Armenian and Classical histories. He is on the whole critical of the ancient chronicles and the accuracy of their chronology, suggesting that by not being sufficiently discriminating, their authors allowed information “refuted both by synchronicity and common sense” (p.194).

Shopen is also very much concerned with the endonyms and exonyms of the peoples of the Caucasus, and believed that changing names over the centuries reflected the movements of real populations — most interestingly, he thought that the modern Armenians were in fact Phyrgian and Ionian interlopers from the north, and that the “true” Armenians called themselves “Gaikans” (possibly some confusion with Armenia’s endonym, “Hayastan”) (p.30-35). This must have been controversial even at the time, and the Russian Shopen pre-emptively addresses his detractors on page 190, referring to the “corruption” (razvrashenie) of the Armenians and implying that they would not have reacted in the same way to a native historian.

The work discusses linguistics at length, especially Georgian and Armenian, addressing in particular the shortcomings of the existing canonical works of his time such as works by the famous Brosset, a French based in St. Petersburg and specialised in Georgian.

Although sometimes dated, Shopen’s linguistic theories remain interesting, drawing from many languages, including Hebrew, Chinese, Chaldean… Like other early historical linguists, he groups together words that sound similar (for example, the Armenian “van” to the Mandarin Chinese “wang”, both meaning “king” p. 150), and attempts to ascertain a precise etymology for many demonyms which have no certain explanation (for example, he links the Georgian endonym “kartli” (or “kartveli”) with the Finnish word -by way of Chaldean- for “horned cattle” (p. 273), and the word “Olympus” to the Tatar word “alinpe”, or “snow mountain” (p.104)).

Shopen’s remarkable effort in these New Notes and his scholarship was foundational for the study of the region in the Russian Empire, providing in an easily digestible form the extremely lengthy source material. The third and final chapter, on Caucasian Albania (the site of modern Azerbaijan), is particularly noteworthy and yields much information on an understudied polity.

Scarce on the market; although copies can be found in institutions, we could trace only one copy at auction in recent decades, including Russia.

Bibliography

Chahin, M. 2001. ‘The Kingdom of Armenia’. Curzon.