In the eighth century, Armenia was part of the early Islamic Caliphate. Ruled first by the Umayyads and then by the ʿAbbasids, the province sat on the edge of empires and faced both the Eastern Roman Empire and the Khazar Khaganate. Its position at the interstices offered Armenia a unique vantage point—far from a backwater province, it was on the front lines of world events. Over the past decades, many eminent Armenologists have worked to demonstrate how interconnected Armenian culture was with the broader storylines of the Near East. However, as a region with its own religious and historiographical traditions, Armenian history is still all too frequently set aside as “other” or “different.”
At the heart of this talk is a book of history written in the eighth century by an Armenian priest named Łewond. His history offers an instructive view of the extensive and complicated ties between Armenian, Arabic, and Greek sources of the early Islamic period as historical reports circulated between communities both textually and orally. The close study of Łewond’s text allows us to trace particular details and ideas as they crossed religious, political, and linguistic borders of the Near East. However, above and beyond the borrowing of reports or phrases across languages, the history also raises the broader question of shared concepts about genre.
