According to many scholars, the historical research carried out in Azerbaijan with state support has been falsified to exalt the Caucasian Albanians as the alleged ancestors of Azerbaijanis and to provide a historical basis for territorial disputes with Armenians. Much of this false historiography aims to root Azerbaijanis in the territory of Azerbaijan, cleanse it of Armenian heritage,In 1988, following the demands of the Karabagh Armenians to secede from Azerbaijan and join Armenia, a number of Azeri academics, led by Zia Bunyatov, to justify their government's claims regarding the Armenian populated region of Nagorno-Karabakh, rushed to prove that the Armenian population of Karabagh had only arrived there after 1828 and thus had no historical claims to the region. Lacking any sources written in Azeri-since the Azeri alphabet was created in the twentieth century, and refusing, for obvious reasons, to cite Armenian sources, they had to rely on sources written in Persian, Arabic, and Russian, among others.
Therefore, to substantiate their political claims, Bunyatov and his fellow academics chose to set aside all scholarly integrity and print large numbers of re-edited versions of these not easily accessible primary sources on Karabagh, while deleting or altering references to the Armenians.Другим способом преуменьшить присутствие армян в древнем и средневековом Закавказье и умалить их роль является переиздание античных и средневековых источников с купюрами, с заменой термина «Армянское государство» на «Албанское государство» или с иными искажениями оригинальных текстов. В 1960—1990–х годах в Баку вышло немало таких переизданий первоисточников, чем активно занимался академик 3. М. Буниятов. В самые последние годы, описывая этнические процессы и их роль в истории Азербайджана, азербайджанские авторы порой вообще избегают обсуждать вопрос о появлении там азербайджанского языка и азербайджанцев, тем самым давая читателю понять, что они существовали там испокон веков.
Вряд ли азербайджанские историки делали все это исключительно по своей воле; над ними довлел заказ партийно-правительственных структур Азербайджана.
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Здесь-то на помощь политикам и приходят историки, археологи, этнографы и лингвисты, которые всеми силами стремятся, во-первых, укоренить азербайджанцев на территории Азербайджана, а во-вторых, очистить последнюю от армянского наследия. Эта деятельность не просто встречает благожелательный приём у местных властей, но, как мы видели, санкционируется президентом республики. and depict Armenians as newcomers.Mutafian, C. (2023). "Chapter 1 Survey of Historical Geography of the South Caucasus from the Middle Ages to the Present Day". In Monuments and Identities in the Caucasus. Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004677388_003 p. 38. "The Azeri authorities are now facing a double challenge. All their argumentation is based on two claims: (A) that the country named the Republic of Azerbaijan is entirely theirs—i.e., of the ethnic Azeris speaking a Turkic language—because they have been its native population since the dawn of time; and (B) that the Armenians are newcomers, implanted in the South Caucasus by Russia in the nineteenth century, and therefore have no roots in the region. However, as we have seen, any examination of the history of the region leads without any doubt to diametrically opposite conclusions."
Overview
Multiple observers — including those from government, genocide experts,IAGS EB Statement on Azerbaijani Aggression Against the Republic of Armenia and the Indigenous Armenians of the South Caucasus, October 2022. The International Association of Genocide Scholars. "Rewriting of history and cultural destruction are key hallmarks of genocide. The goal of génocidaires is to destroy, in whole or in part, the targeted group, and one way the perpetrators carry out this destruction is through cultural destruction: eliminating the very essence of the group’s identity, and any trace that they existed in that location." and others — state that Azerbaijan engages in historical revisionism to support its territorial claims, deprive Armenians of their own territorial claims. and eliminate traces of historical Armenian presence. This has involved the falsification of history, alongside the erasure of Armenian cultural heritage sites, and place-names. as well as the imposition of a state monopoly over Armenian cultural studies, which limits independent research and enforces official narratives.Caucasus Heritage Watch. "CHW Special Report #1 -- Silent Erasure: A Satellite Investigation of the Destruction of Armenian Cultural Heritage in Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan." (September 2022). p.6 "In 2005, a Scottish traveler, Steven Sim, went to Nakhchivan to investigate the condition of Armenian monuments there. He was detained by authorities, who insisted that Armenians had never lived in the region, and then expelled him from the country. A year later, in August 2006, Azerbaijan barred a delegation from the European Parliament seeking to evaluate an Armenian cemetery near Jugha/Julfa (N.307). In 2011, the U.S. Ambassador to Azerbaijan, Matthew Bryza, was likewise denied access to that same site." Petrosyan et al. state that Azerbaijan's use of historical falsification aim "to neutralize the Armenian identity of Artsakh."
Genocide scholars Edita Gzoyan et al. write "we are witnessing a systematic, scholarly, political, and military attempt to de-Armenize the land, its names, geography, and history. This process resembles Lemkin’s notion of genocide—the destruction of the national pattern of the targeted group and the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor." Analysts have observed that Azerbaijan is distinct from other genocidaires insofar as it not only attempts to erase the history of Armenians in the Caucasus but denies their very existence, thereby attempting to minimize the nature of the crime. The European Centre for Law and Justice states "to accomplish complete cultural erasure, Azerbaijan has gone beyond merely destroying Armenian heritage—Azerbaijan is also denying it ever existed," adding that "Azerbaijan seeks to erase...even the memory of the Armenian people."
Alexandra Xanthaki, the UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights expressed concern over the "ongoing pattern of destruction and appropriation of Armenian historically, culturally, and religiously significant sites and objects....[including]...the organised reinterpretation of the history of Nagorno-Karabakh to erase the traces of the presence of Armenians," adding concern that the "allegations that the combined attacks to people, monuments and symbols, the falsification of the historical narrative and erasure of place names...may amount to cultural cleansing."
History
Under Mir Cəfər Bağırov's leadership as First Secretary of the Azeri SSR, efforts began to erase the historical Armenian presence in Azerbaijan and elevate the Azeri majority to the sole titular nation. Anti-Armenian historical revisionism developed in the 1950-1960s, and promoted the false narrative that Azerbaijanis are descendants of the indigenous Caucasian Albanians. By the 1980s, Azerbaijani media and textbooks pushed more extreme revisionist accounts that included the following: that no Armenians had ever existed in Nagorno-Karabakh nor formed an independent state, that no Caucasian Albanians were Armenianized, that Armenians were newcomers to the region only following Russian intervention.
These revisions, driven by Soviet and later post-Soviet nationalism, contributed to ethnic tensions and paved the way for the ethnic cleansing of Armenians. In certain instances, Azeri historiography explicitly prohibits mentions of Armenians, with the intention of erasing the historical presence of Armenians. Arsène Saparov, Caucasus expert, states that "the persistent Azerbaijani policy of denial of the Armenian presence and cultural heritage in the Caucasus...has been institutionalized since Ilham Aliyev became president."
The concept of "Albanian Khachdash"
One of the most typical and widespread medieval Armenian monuments are khachkars () - stone steles with a cross and carvings used as tombstones and objects of worship. Khachkars remained in large numbers on all lands where Armenians lived. Therefore, an important manifestation of the "Albanization" of the Armenian cultural heritage was the theory proclaiming the Armenian khachkars of Nagorno-Karabakh, Nakhichevan and (separating them) the Armenian Syunik as Albanian artifacts under the name "khachdashi" (with the replacement of the Armenian – car, "stone", with the Azeri – dash of the same meaning). According to the Azerbaijani architectural historian , khachdashi are distinguished by the fact that they bear in their decor signs of a fusion of Christianity with pre-Christian Albanian beliefs and contain symbols of Mithraism and Zoroastrianism.
In 1985, at the All-Union Archaeological Congress in Baku, Davud Aga-oglu Akhundov made a report in which he expressed these ideas, which provoked a scandal. The Armenian delegation announced its readiness to leave the conference, Leningrad scientists assessed Akhundov's report as a pseudoscientific political action. American archaeologist Philip L. Kohl believes that this report was a deliberate political provocation and aimed at creating a knowingly false cultural myth.
As Russian and Armenian critics later noted, Akhundov simply either did not know or deliberately ignored the well-known features of Christian iconography, declaring these subjects to be Mithraic, and also looked over the Armenian inscriptions on the "khachdash" he studied. According to the Russian specialist A. L. Yakobson, "Mithraist fog envelops almost all the monuments that the authors of <D. A. Akhundov with co-author M. D. Akhundov>, not to mention their generalizations". So, describing the Julfa khachkars of the 16th–17th centuries, Akhundov sees in the images of a lion, a bull and a bird "the eternal companions of God Mithra", while, according to experts, these are undoubted symbols of the Evangelists. The concept of "khachdash" was finally completed in Akhundov's book "Architecture of Ancient and Early Medieval Azerbaijan", reviewed by Academician Ziya Buniyatov, Doctor of Historical Sciences V.G. Aliyev and Doctor of Art History, Professor N.A Sarkisov.Victor Schnirelmann. "Войны памяти: мифы, идентичность и политика в Закавказье." (in Russian), p. 213
This theory is now officially accepted in Azerbaijani science and propaganda. Thus, the chairman of the Azerbaijan Copyright Agency, Kamran Imanov, denounces the "Armenian tradition of appropriating our cultural values" as follows: These "scientists" at one time stole almost all the wonderful examples of our Christian past – memorials, churches, steles, tombstones, our khachdash, announced "Khachkars". According to the latest theories of Azerbaijani scholars, the custom of erecting stone khachdash crosses was brought to the Caucasus by the Turks back in the "pre-Albanian era".
Rhetoric Historians which have documented the falsification of Azerbaijani historiography include Victor Schnirelmann, Anatoly Yakobson, Vladimir Zakharov, Mikhail Meltyukhov, Hasan Javadi, Philip L. Kohl and George Bournoutian.
Territorial Claims