Note 1 — Chapter XVII · TO ANI AND TO KARS

That this scene—in itself a world, and a world which fills the mind with wonder—has of necessity been the theatre of momentous events in the life of humanity, the traveller realises at a single glance. His pious predecessors were surely justified in accepting the ancient belief of the Armenians, that our first father and mother loved and suffered in this plain.1 If we are to seek the site of Paradise within the limits of Armenia, neither the Euphrates nor the Tigris crosses a country equally appropriate to have been the earliest and fairest home of man. It looks the land of hope which Noah tilled and planted with vineyards, the second nursery of the human race. The Armenians, whose mythical history connects them closely with Babylonia and Assyria, who from the earliest times have been accustomed to receive Jewish immigrants and to see Jewish colonies established in their midst, must at a remote date have localised the events of the Biblical narrative in this the most favoured of all their valleys and at the foot of the loftiest of their mountains.2 If the Jewish writings which they inherited were believed to have reference to their native surroundings, it was only natural that they should identify with the same districts the primeval setting of the later creations of the Jewish mind; the whole countryside became hallowed by religious tradition; nor need we feel surprise when we read that a tree in the neighbourhood of Karakala on the Araxes was believed to have sheltered Job and his three friends.3 When the horizon narrows and embraces the particular history of the Armenians, we find that some of the first beginnings of their history are placed within this fertile and spacious plain; it was the chosen seat of Armenak, the son or grandson of their progenitor, Hayk, to which he descended from the mountains about the head waters of the Euphrates, accompanied by his whole race. Here were situated their most ancient cities, of some of which the relics still stand above ground and invite discussion of which city they denote the site. Armavir, the contemporary of Nineveh, with the grove of plane trees which worked the magic of the oaks of Dodona, has been identified with the ruins that are found on the little hillock which we distinguish from the detail of the landscape at our feet.4 Further west, on the southern bank of the river, where it is enclosed by rocky cliffs of basaltic lava, due to the passage of a lava stream, modern travellers have discovered considerable remains of ancient masonry, which have been utilised to build the castle of Karakala, and which are still, I believe, in want of their older name.5 Traces of the fortress of Ervandakert, and of Ervandashat, its companion city, which were built in the first century of our era by an Armenian monarch of Arsakid descent, have been remarked on either bank of the Arpa river, the ancient Akhurean, where it issues from the elevated country on the north of the Araxes and effects its confluence at the head of this plain.6 In the days when those cities flourished, the haughty Araxes was spanned by bridges of which, here and there, a pier or a buttress still survives.7 Below the lofty rock of Takjaltu lie the famous salt mines of Kulpi, which have been exploited from immemorial times.