The boundaries between the Iranian and Armenian worlds were porous in many ways. The Armenian presence in Iran is attested from the Achaemenid centuries to the present. Although the Armenian Iranian community has decreased significantly since the nineteenth century, it still constitutes the most significant Christian element in Iran, finding means to preserve in large measure its religion, language, and traditions and to navigate between Armenian and Iranian identities.
Kindred Voices explores how the region’s Muslim and Christian poets grappled with the multilingual and multi-religious worlds they inhabited, attempting to impart resonant forms of instruction to their intermingled communities.
In this lecture Thomas Sinclair will look at the most prosperous period of east-west trade through Armenia—the period of the Il-Khans—in the second half of the Middle Ages (1100-1500), and within that period at the most important avenue of trade. It ran from Ayas in the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia to the city of Sivas/Sebasteia, then through Armenia to the Il-Khanid capital of Tabriz.
Examining case studies from Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia to Nagorno Karabakh and its surrounding regions and Nakhijevan in Azerbaijan, scholars will present comparative and connective histories of how the historian’s craft and its proponents have been implicated in the incitement of conflict and the destruction of cultural heritage.