A History of Armenia

by Vahan M. Kurkjian

Background
When I became interested in Armenia, mostly because of my focus on Antiquity, I discovered there was not that much historical and antiquarian material online about the country, so this is my first contribution.
The dust-jacket of the 1964 edition (for which, since my own copy is nude, I am indebted to Gerald Ottenbreit, Jr. of the Armenian Research Center at the University of Michigan-Dearborn) includes the following information on Mr. Kurkjian: Author, teacher, and community leader, Vahan M. Kurkjian was born in Aleppo in 1863.
In 1904 Mr. Kurkjian published in Cairo, Egypt, the Armenian newspaper Loussaper (The Morning Star), in whose pages he and other noted intellectuals called for a national union for the Armenian people. The idea eventually materialized in the form of the Armenian General Benevolent Union, established in Cairo, in 1906, with Boghos Nubar, distinguished humanitarian, as founder and first president.

In 1907 he emigrated to the United States and studied law at Boston University. Two years later he founded the first American chapter of the Armenian General Benevolent Union in Boston, after which the organization spread its branches throughout the States. From its inception he has been inseparably identified with the Union, serving as its executive director until his retirement in 1939.

Mr. Kurkjian contributed countless articles to Armenian newspapers, and published a number of books and pamphlets. He died in New York City in 1961.

Vahan Kurkjian's intended audience was thus the Armenian community in the United States: he has done them a great service, as well as to anyone seeking comprehensive basic information on Armenian history; and indeed, when he wrote, there seems to have been no other general history of Armenia in English: at any rate I know of none other in the public domain that could therefore be presented online.

Caution, though, is unfortunately in order. The author is clearly not a professional historian, and his book is not a scholarly work; rather, a general text based on ill assimilated (and now dated) secondary works. To boot, the book is both disordered and not well written, and in spots very poorly; a good copy editor would have much improved it.

This short list of additional resources may therefore also prove useful:
General summaries of Armenian history, much briefer of course than our book:
Armeniapedia
Dennis Papazian
Tourism Armenia
Livius.Org (ancient Armenia thru 330 A.D.)

More generally, the other external sites listed on my Armenia homepage.
Source material online, of great benefit to the serious student of Armenian history:
Robert Bedrosian's site, a mine of excellent information on Armenian, Persian, Georgian, Turkish, and Iranian history: and specifically, detailed chronological tables and primary sources in his own English translations.

On ancient Armenia, an accurate, up-to-date, scholarly book:
Amélie Kuhrt, The Ancient Near East. c. 3000‑330 B.C. (2 vols., Routledge, London and New York, 1995). Vol. I Ch. 5 is relevant to chapters V‑VI of Kurkjian; Vol. II Ch. 10 is relevant to chapters VII‑X.

Copyright, Proofreading
A History of Armenia by Vahan M. Kurkjian was first published in 1958 by the Armenian General Benevolent Union of America. The text, actually taken here from the 1964 reprinting, is in the public domain since the 1958 copyright was not renewed at the appropriate time (1985‑1986), and the work has therefore fallen into the public domain. (Details here.)

As usual, I retyped the text rather than scanning it: not only to minimize errors prior to proofing, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise which I heartily recommend. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if successful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.)

In the table of contents below, the chapters and sections are given on blue backgrounds, indicating that they have been thoroughly proofread; any red backgrounds would indicate that my transcription had not yet been proofread. The header bar at the top of each webpage will remind you with the same color scheme. In any case, should you spot an error, please do report it, of course.

The book contains 65 engravings and 28 photographs. Some of them relate directly to the text, others illustrate it only loosely; I've reproduced all of them. Since a Web transcription is not bound by the same constraints as a print edition (no need to fit in a certain slot on a printed page, for example), occasionally they're not at quite the same point in the text. The original page location is given in the name of the image.

Further details on the technical aspects of the site layout follow the Table of Contents below.

There are a Table of Contents

Source: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/Asia/Armenia/

Bibliography about Armenian History Books