According to Hurriyet, presently activities are carried out in Turkey to receive 3D designs of Van kings gravestones through laser and the latest technologies; the work was taken up by the Department of History and Archaeology of the University in Istanbul. According to the same source, the Turks consider the gravestones the most important monuments of Urartu period. Naturally, all of this is attributed to the Turks.
Aravot.am asked Dr. Ashot Melkonyan, director of the ANAS Institute of History, Doctor of Historical Sciences, to give assessment to all that: “I’m not surprised, Turks have started to appropriate the history of Urartu long ago, and we certainly have a share of guilt in this. Unfortunately, there are directions in our historiography, which do not see Urartu as an integral part of Armenian statehood and consider an anti-Armenian state.
In the result of this approach to the history, our neighbors master the history of Urartu. The Turkish Historical Society, which was created in the 1930’s by Mustafa Kemal instruction, faced just a similar problem, to show just from the beginning the presence of Turks in this region, particularly, in Van kingdom. And, now they consider this issue “resolved” at the state level, they consider Urartu to be the first Turkish state in this region. I think that our historiography needs to finally give up the rotten concept of historiography, and fully presents Urartu as a unified Armenian state with its ethnic composition, like we tried to do it in high school textbooks, the same is now done in 6-9th grades textbook. Generally, in the issue of history of Urartu, not only Turks but Azeris, and partly Georgians have become claimants, in which our previous generation have their share of guilt,”-says Mr. Melkonyan.
And what disturbs to counter the Turkish falsification on a state level? “I repeat, there is a scientific point of view, according to which Urartu is not Armenian in reality, it is pre-Armenia, whose language was not Armenian, as if there was such a language, Urartian, which had nothing in common with Armenian language, and as if the kings of Urartu were not Armenian descent. Under these conditions, of course, there cannot be a state approach, when, unfortunately, there is no single approach in historical sciences. Anyway, the opinion of the Institute of History is unambiguously: Urartu is our kingdom of Ararat, the first unified Armenian state formation in the Armenian Highland, before which, still in the third millennium there were other state formations, as Araattan, Etiunin, Hayasa Azi and more. In other words, the history of Armenian statehood at least begins from the third millennium before Christ,”-assures the scientist.
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Gohar HAKOBYAN
