Armenia and Georgia

The history and culture of the Indo-European Armenians and the Kartvelian Georgians from remote antiquity to the present is the province of the Near East Section. Although linguistically different, these two peoples share a measure of common ancestry. They have also been neighbors for millennia. This and the fact that since the seventh century A.D. they are unique to the Middle East by being Christian states in an Islamic milieu make it natural that materials in their respective languages should be maintained together.

Georgia, stretching from the verdant Caucasus Mountains in the north to the Kura River in the south, and Armenia, from the lesser Caucasus mountains in the north through the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the south, have been witness to the appearance and disappearance of a host of peoples throughout the ages, all of whom both influenced the Armenians and Georgians and were influenced by them. They included Hittites and Urartians; Persians; Greeks; the Romans and Parthians; Turks and Mongols; and Russians and Europeans. All passed through these land bridges between north and south and east and west. To study the literary, historical, and cultural records of Armenia and Georgia is to cast your net into the sea of all these people. Vital to understanding these lands is knowledge that all Armenian and Georgian literature is essentially Christian literature. Both alphabets were created in the fifth century A.D. chiefly as vehicles to propagate the Christian faith. Much of the Near East collections, then, have to do with Christianity and with the Armenian and Georgian churches.

[Left] - This 1825 collection of Tught endhanarakan (Encyclical letters) of St. Nerses Shnorhali (ca. 1100-1173), Armenian katholikos and poet, is a splendid example of the important Constantinopolitan tradition in early Armenian book publishing. The renowned and revered ecclesiastic is pointedly portrayed towering over his devoted clerics. (Near East Section) [Right] - Published in St. Petersburg in 1882, this beautifully lithographed Sakartvelos Samotxe (The garden/paradise of Georgia) provides biographies of important Georgian Orthodox Christian saints. Although the text is printed in the common mxedruli (military) script, the depiction of St. Evstati of Mcxeta, the medieval capital of Georgia, shown in the background, is identified using the older, xucuri (priestly) uncials. (Near East Section)

After centuries of partition, division, and conquest, the northeastern portion of Armenia, scarcely a tenth of its historical breadth, and the whole of Georgia in the 1920s became Soviet republics. This accounted for an explosion of publications from the Soviet educational and academic institutions, now well represented in the section's collections. When both these ancient lands achieved independence in 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union, they enjoyed a sense of freedom of expression that resulted in the 1990s in a burst of publications of various genres.

Western books about Armenia and Georgia have been found in the Library's General Collections from the nineteenth century. Histories, grammars, travelogues, archaeological collections, and editions and translations of Christian texts are there and in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Yet at the time of the creation of the Near East Section, the Library had scarcely 200 Armenianlanguage books and even fewer Georgian-language works. In the late 1940s, Arthur Dadian, an American of Armenian descent living in Washington, D.C., created with the approval of Luther Evans, Librarian of Congress, the Committee for the Armenian Collection of the Library of Congress, expressly to help the Library in acquiring Armenian-language materials in all fields of study. The committee was so successful that in 1959 the section hired a specialist to guide these efforts.

In 1991, Arthur Dadian's widow, Marjorie Dadian, created an endowment from the estate of her husband for the growth and maintenance of the Library's Armenian collections. This original bequest was supplemented by one from her own estate in 1997. Both were extremely generous and support acquisitions, programs, and successor staff specialists to continue the Library's efforts on behalf of Armenian materials. Matching appropriated funds supported for the first time the systematic acquisition of Georgian materials, guided by that same specialist.

Several medieval and early modern Armenian manuscripts grace the collection, from an important fourteenth-century tetraevangile and two eighteenthcentury profusely and elegantly illustrated missals to several ornate seventeenthcentury calligraphy sheets. The modern era is represented by a fourteen-volume diary meticulously handwritten by the twentieth-century Armenian American David Atamian. Atamian's memoirs provide moving and important narration of the Armenian massacres of 1915 and of the author's journey to America as well as the tale of his ultimate Americanization.

Although the Armenians were among the first Middle Easterners to adopt movable type (the first book printed in Armenian script dates to 1511) the Library's earliest Armenian works date from the early 1700s and come from the influential presses of Istanbul, seat of the Ottoman Armenian Patriarchate, and Ejmiatsin, home of the Katholikos of All Armenians, the head of the Armenian Church. It is, however, from the centuries-old Armenian diaspora that the great number of these early works spring. The Armenian Catholic Mekhitarist monasteries at Vienna and Venice began extensive publication activity in the eighteenth century, and publications from pressses and publishing houses in India, Russia, Iran, Jerusalem, and the Arab world in general account for a significant part of the section's collections.

[Left and Center]- A fullpage illumination of the crucifixion of Christ and an identifiably Armenian ornamented title page open this illuminated manuscript, copied in 1722. The text is a missal designed to be used by the priest (bottom left), who is shown in marginalia throughout the text celebrating the divine liturgy. [Right] - Peacocks often were depicted in illuminations of medieval Armenian manuscripts. This brightly colored example is one of many artistic devices placed in the margins of another missal, also copied in 1722 and owned by the Library. (Near East Section)

Together with Armenian-language works published in Europe, the Armenian collection is rich in pre-Soviet and Soviet-era academic monographs and serials, and the Georgian contains a significant number of Soviet-era works. Supplementing the Library's vast collection of Western periodicals, the section continues its efforts to acquire historical newspapers and to maintain complete sets of many contemporary Armenian and Georgian serials, such as the indispensable Patma-banasirakan handes (Historico-Philological Review) (Yerevan, 1958-present).

The custodial Georgian and Armenian collections include representative publications from the various diasporan communities around the world, whether in other countries of the Middle East or in Asia, Europe, or the United States. Newsletters and newspapers are gathered and maintained as primary documents of the contemporary experience. The section has taken advantage of the burst of publishing activity that followed the independence of both republics in 1991 to acquire monographs and ephemera to document the birth and growth of democracy in these ancient lands. Hayastani Hanrapetutyun, the state newspaper from Yerevan, Armenia, and Sakartvelos Respublika, its analog from Tbilisi, Georgia, are among the most important contemporary documents in the section's constantly growing collections. These are augmented by the burgeoning number of electronic news reports emanating from Armenia and Georgia through the Internet, which are available to researchers as well.

Multivolume microfilm collections found in the Microform Reading Room dovetail with the vernacular collections in the Near East Section. These include Armenian Architecture; Georgian Architecture; three volumes of rare nineteenth-century works; Armenian Sources; and Manuscripts from the Armenian and Greek Patriarchates of Jerusalem. Rare photographs in the Prints and Photographs Division; papers and letters of such statesmen as Ambassador Henry Morgenthau Sr. (1856-1946); or of missionaries such as William Goodell (1792-1867) in the Manuscript Division; musical scores and anthologies of both classical and folk music in the Performing Arts Reading Room; and recordings of European-style operas, such as Anush by the nineteenth-century Armenian composer Armen Tigranyan, also offer insights into the history and culture of these ancient peoples of the Caucasus. These vernacular and nonvernacular collections together form the basis of a major research center for the study of Armenia and Georgia in particular, as well as many other peoples of the Caucasus.

The Armenian Monastery of Surb Karapet (the Holy Precursor, St. John the Baptist) in Mush, Turkey, constructed in the tenth century, was at the dawn of the twentieth century one of the three most important sites for Armenian Christian pilgrimage. Although this magnificent example of Armenian architecture was destroyed to its foundations in 1915, these two photographic views [Left and Right], deposited for registration in the U.S. Copyright Office in 1923 by Vartan A. Hampikian, attest to its original splendor and are, thus, of enormous value to scholars. (Prints and Photographs Division)