Situating the history attributed to Aristakēs Lastiverc‘i, 1000-1072: The empire of New Rome & Caucasia in the Eleventh Century

This thesis answers a major scholarly desideratum in Armenian, Byzantine, Kartvelian (Georgian), Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies more broadly, by providing a foundational study of the eleventh-century Armenophone History attributed to Aristakēs Lastiverc‘i. This is the sole surviving Armenian-language historiographical work written in the eleventh century that discusses the era, and is the earliest surviving historiographical work in any language to discuss the Middle East’s eleventh-century Muslim Turkish raids and Seljuq invasions. Hence the History is widely known and used as a “source”, but the only dedicated study was completed by the original critical editor more than fifty years ago with limited parameters and limiting assumptions. Thus this thesis provides a (re-)foundational study of a source central to several disciplines.
In doing so the project develops a critical historical approach to technical analyses of historical compositions. Such foundational studies are usually emblematic of disciplinary history’s empiricist and positivist hegemonic norms: providing an overview of previous scholarship, describing the narrative structure, deducing underlying sources, giving an overview of the textual transmission, and placing the composition in broader literary traditions, as well as providing the writer’s historical and social “context”. Disciplinary history’s inherent positivism and empiricism has been consistently critiqued from several directions over the last forty years or so, but none of these tendencies, most falling under the umbrella term “postmodernism”, have provided alternative approaches to foundational analyses of historical compositions – an essential task for a wide range of further enquiries.
This project, therefore, attempts to answer this shortfall. We begin in the introduction with an outline of the project’s critical historical conceptualisation, turning then to a critique of Armenian studies’ hegemonic narrative of the eleventh century, before ending with a critical overview of the empire of New Rome’s hegemonic cycle in Caucasia, culminating in the eleventh century with the History’s conjuncture. Thereafter the study proper begins, starting from a firm distinction between analysis of the work, the actual empirical base, and the writer, an imagined historical actor. In part I we focus solely on the work, adopting a consciously empiricist standpoint to provide a foundational study of this historical composition, critiquing previous scholarship, deducing the narrative structure through a detailed description, critically imagining underlying sources, historically and socially situating the work’s afterlife in subsequent Armenophone compositions and manuscript transmission, and finally locating it within the Armenophone tradition of historiography. This empiricist analysis ends with the argument that the History was conceived as a historiographical composition insofar as that provided the vehicle for an effective homily.
This argument provides the pivot to part II, a study of the writer, which departs from part I’s empiricist standpoint to adopt a critical framework combining initial social-historical analysis with a socially symbolic reading of the History as a complex narrative. Having explicated this critical framework, the first subsection elaborates the social categories into which Aristakēs falls as a historical actor: vardapet, citizen of Arcn, identified Armenian, Roman subject, and elite man. In each subsequent subsection one of these categories is historicised in turn with concrete content for the History’s conjuncture, in each case coupling broader social-historical analysis with a socially symbolic reading to identify the given category’s content in the narrative’s ideological structure. In such manner it becomes possible to critically imagine this historical actor without reifying them – that is, without making them seemingly objective as a “real person”.
In conclusion these categories are brought into relation with each other in a situated imagining of Aristakēs and the History as historical actors. Rather than a reified “person”, Aristakēs is revealed as a complex historical actor who participated in his historical time and place, composing the History as another historical actor to project a specific meaning of History across elite actors whose lived experience resonated with the work’s ideological structure. This situated imagining, then, arrives at the project’s final argument: the concrete complexity of the social system(s) indicated by this thesis cannot be adequately comprehended within disciplinary borders as they currently stand. Rather than discrete fields implying mastery over whole “cultures”, or, more honestly and problematically, nations and states, it is necessary for a real movement to abolish these borders, and develop a critical area studies of Anatolia, Upper Mesopotamia and Caucasia.

Keywords: Armenia
Armenians
Byzantium
Historiography
Caucasus
Literary Theory
Social Theoy
Advisor: Van Lint, TM