Armenians consider themselves direct descendants of Noah, the survivor of the Biblical flood. According to Genesis, the boat came to rest on a mountain in the Ararat range. Ararat, located in the heart of Armenia, was a Holy Mountain for the people of the ancient world. Many ancient scriptures placed the Biblical Garden of Eden in the Land of Armenia which was also called the Land of Ararat.
Armenian tradition has preserved several legends concerning the origin of the Armenian nation. The most important of these tells of Hayk, the eponymous hero of the Armenians who called themselves Hay and their country Hayk or Hayastan.
The historian of the 5th century, Movses Khorenatsi who is also at some length related to the valiant deeds of Aram whose fame extended far beyond the limits of his country.
Consequently, the neighboring nations called the people Armens or Armenians. Archeology has extended the prehistory of Armenia to the Acheulian age (500,000 years ago), when hunting and gathering people crossed the lands in pursuit of migrating herds. The first period of prosperity was enjoyed by inhabitants of the Armenian upland in the third millennium B.C. These people were among the first to forge bronze, invent the wheel, and cultivate grapes. The first written records to mention the inhabitants of Armenia come from hieroglyphs of the Hittite Kingdom, inscribed from 1388 to 1347 B.C., in Asia Minor. The earliest inscription to be found directly upon Armenian lands, carved in 1114 B.C. by the Assyrians and describes a coalition of the kings of the central Armenian region referring to them as "the people of Nairi."
By the 9th century B.C., a confederation of local tribes flourished as the unified state of Urartu (see the map)which grew to become one of the strongest kingdoms in the Near East and constituted a formidable rival to Assyria for supremacy in the region. The Urartians produced and exported wares of ceramic, stone and metal, building fortresses, temples, palaces and other large public works. One of their irrigation canals is still used today in Yerevan, Armenia's capital—a city which stands upon the ancient Urartian fortress of Erebuni.
The "renaissance of Armenia" was accomplished during the reign of Tigran the Great (95-99 B.C.), who proclaimed himself as the "King of Kings." Under the rule of Tigran II, Armenia grew to a great degree of military strength and political influence. According to the Greek biographer Plutarch, the Roman general Lucullos said about the king, "In Armenia, Tigran is seated and surrounded with the power which has wrested Asia from the Parthians, which carries Greek colonies into Media, subdues Syria and Palestine and cuts off the Seleucids." And Cicero, the Roman orator and politician, adds, "He made the Republic of Rome tremble before the powers of his arms."
In order to realize the real implications of the history of Armenia and grasp the soul of its people, we must turn our gaze upon the beginning of the 4th century, which was momentous in its consequences for the growth of the nation. King Tiridates III (Trdat), having been converted by Gregory the Illuminator, proclaimed Christianity as the religion of the state in 301 A.D. Thus, Armenia became the first nation to embrace Christianity officially on a state level. This was 12 years before the Emperor Constantine's Edict of Milan which declared tolerance of Christians in the Roman Empire.
Throughout its history, the kingdom of Armenia faced periods of independence intermitted with periods of autonomy subject to contemporary empires. Armenia's strategic location between two continents subjected it to invasion subsequently by the Persians, Arabs, Byzantium, Seljuk Turks, Mongols and Russians.
The conversion to Christianity was inevitably to bring in its wake complications of a political nature and to arouse grave anxieties in neighboring Persia. The Sassanian Persians took advantage of Armenia's inner weakness and launched an unsuccessful campaign to stamp out Christianity there and replace it with Mazdaism.
In the 7th century, the mighty Arabs stormed into Armenia and conquered the country.In beginning of the 9th century, Armenia enjoyed a brilliant period of independence when the powerful Bagratid Dynasty asserted political authority. Resumption of international trade brought prosperity and the revival of artistic and literary pursuits. The capital of Ani grew to a population of about 100,000, more than any urban center in Europe. Religious life flourished and Ani became known as the "city of one thousand and one churches."
In the middle of the 11th century, most of Armenia had been annexed by Byzantium. The destruction of the Bagratid Kingdom was completed by raids of new invaders, the Seljuk Turks from Central Asia. With little resistance from weakened Byzantium, the Seljuk Turks spread into Asia Minor as well as the Armenian highlands. This invasion compelled a large number of Armenians to move south, towards the Taurus Mountains close to the Mediterranean Sea, where in 1080 under the leadership of Ruben (Rubenid dynasty),they found the Kingdom of Cilicia or Lesser Armenia (see a bigger map). Close contacts with the Crusaders and with Europe led to absorbing Western European ideas, including its feudal class structure. Cilician Armenia became a country of barons, knights and serfs. The court at Sis adopted European clothes. Latin and French were used alongside Armenian.
The Cilician period is regarded as the Golden Age of Armenian Illumination, noted for the lavishness of its decoration and the frequent influence of con-temporary western manuscript painting. Their location on the Mediterranean coast soon involved Cilician Armenians in international trade between the interior of Western Asia and Europe. For nearly 300 years, the Cilician Kingdom of Armenia prospered. The last monarch, King Levon VI, died at Calais, France in 1393, and his remains were laid to rest at St. Denis (near Paris) among the kings of France.
While in the 13th century the Armenians prospered in the Cilician Kingdom, those living in Greater Armenia witnessed the invasion of the Mongols. Later, in the 16th and 17th centuries, Armenia was divided between the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Iran.
Persians ruled Eastern Armenia until 1828, when it was annexed by Russia. However, it was the Ottoman Turks who governed most of the Armenian land and population (Western Armenia). During the 19th century, Armenians under Turkish rule suffered from discrimination, heavy taxation and armed attacks.
During the late l9th century, the increasingly reactionary politics of the declining Ottoman Empire and the awakening of the Armenians culminated in a series of Turkish massacres throughout the Armenian provinces in 1894-96. Any illusion cherished by the Armenians for the effect that the acquisition of power in 1908 by the Young Turks might bring better days was soon dispelled.In the spring of 1909, yet another orgy of bloodshed took place in Adana, where 30,000 Armenians lost their lives after desperate resistance.
It is generally accepted that the Armenian Genocide started on April 24, 1915. The Armenians commemorate this date because on April 24, 1915 more than 200 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders were arrested and then murdered in Constantinople. However, the Turkish plan of uprooting the Armenians from their ancestral homeland was masterminded far beforehand. The outbreak of the WWI in 1914 gave the Young Turks the perfect opportunity to solve the Armenian Question.
In 1915, a secret military directive ordered the arrest and prompt execution of Armenian community leaders. Armenian males serving in the Ottoman army were separated from the rest and slaughtered. The Istanbul government decided to deport the entire Armenian population. Armenians in towns and villages were marched into deserts of Syria, Mesopotamia and Arabia.
During the "relocation" many were flogged to death, bayoneted, buried alive in pits, drowned in rivers, beheaded, raped or abducted into harems. Many simply expired from heat exhaustion and starvation. 1.5 million people perished in this first genocide of the 20th century. Another wave of massacres occurred in Baku (1918), Shushi (1920) and elsewhere.
The defeat of the Ottoman Turks in World War I and the disintegration of the Russian Empire gave the Armenians a chance to declare their independence. On May 28, 1918, the independent Republic of Armenia was established, after the Armenians forced the Turkish troops to withdraw in the battles of Sardarapat, Karakilisse and Bashabaran. Overwhelming difficulties confronted the infant republic, but amid these conditions the Armenians devoted all their energy to the pressing task of reconstructing their country.
However, due to pressure exerted simultaneously by the Turks and Communists, the republic collapsed in 1920. Finally, the Soviet Red Army moved into the territory (Eastern Armenia) and on November 29, 1920, declared it a Soviet republic.
Armenia was made part of the Transcaucasian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic in 1922, and in 1936, it became one of the 15 Soviet Union's constituent republics. The tumultuous changes occurring throughout the Soviet Union beginning in the 1980's inevitably had repercussions in Armenia.
In 1988, a movement of support began in Armenia for the constitutional struggle of Nagorno-Karabagh Armenians to exercise their right for self-determination. Nagorno-Karabakh, the predominantly Armenian populated autonomous region, was placed under the jurisdiction of Azerbaijan by an arbitrary decision of Stalin in 1923. (For additional information please visit the site of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Armenia.) Most recent developments on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict can be viewed in this file.
That same year, in 1988, Armenia was rocked by severe earthquakes that killed thousands of people. Supplies for assistance from both the Soviet Union and the West were blocked by the Azerbaijani Government who were fighting the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. Both of these issues have dominated Armenia's political arena since the first democratic election held in Armenia during the Soviet era.
In 1990, the Armenian National Movement won a majority of seats in the parliament and formed a government. On September 21, 1991, the Armenian people overwhelmingly voted in favor of independence in a national referendum, and an independent Armenia came into being.
The burden of the devastating earthquake of 1988, which destroyed the northern part of the country, engagement in the conflict with Azerbaijan for securing the survival of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabagh, complete transportation blockade from the part of Turkey from one side, and closed borders with Azerbaijan from the other, put the government of newly independent Armenia under a serious constrain.
It was under these conditions that the government of independent Armenia started painful political and economic transition reforms. During the last 5 years the Armenian economy has shown double digit growth rate from 11-13%, one of the highest in the former Soviet Union. In 2003 Armenia became a full member of WTO and was included in a list of countries with a high degree of economic freedom in 2006 occupying 27th place together with other EU countries. In 15-years time Armenia became self-sufficient in major agricultural and food products (except wheat and some types of frozen meat) and even started to export some agricultural commodities.
According to international organizations, Armenia is the only country in the region that exports IT products. Today, the IT Sector of Armenia comprises more than 250 enterprises. Without abundant natural resources, however, with the most valuable, human resources, Armenians are looking forward with optimism and confidence.
Armenian Diaspora was created as a result of genocidal policies of the Ottoman and Young Turkish government when the whole Armenian population of the Western Armenia was sentenced to dispersion. Today, the Diaspora constitutes around 60% of the total nine million Armenians worldwide. Significant Armenian communities are located in the USA, Russia, France, Canada, Latin America and the countries of the Middle East.
Armenian tradition has preserved several legends concerning the origin of the Armenian nation. The most important of these tells of Hayk, the eponymous hero of the Armenians who called themselves Hay and their country Hayk or Hayastan. 
The historian of the 5th century, Movses Khorenatsi who is also at some length related to the valiant deeds of Aram whose fame extended far beyond the limits of his country. 
The "renaissance of Armenia" was accomplished during the reign of Tigran the Great (95-99 B.C.), who proclaimed himself as the "King of Kings." Under the rule of Tigran II, Armenia grew to a great degree of military strength and political influence. According to the Greek biographer Plutarch, the Roman general Lucullos said about the king, "In Armenia, Tigran is seated and surrounded with the power which has wrested Asia from the Parthians, which carries Greek colonies into Media, subdues Syria and Palestine and cuts off the Seleucids." And Cicero, the Roman orator and politician, adds, "He made the Republic of Rome tremble before the powers of his arms." 
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