Armenian expert explains how Yerevan`s history is being rewritten in  Azerbaijan

ArmInfo.  In her work "Eastern Reflections," Anzhela Simonyan, an Armenian Turkologist and researcher of Turkey's military-industrial complex, described how  Azerbaijan is rewriting Yerevan's history and trying to convince  people that the Armenian cultural legacy is nothing more than a myth.

In her Telegram channel, the expert noted that recently, the  Azerbaijani media, particularly the well-known historian Rizvan  Huseynov, has been actively promoting the idea that Yerevan has no  ancient history, and that the Erebuni Fortress and the Armenian  cultural legacy are merely "concrete myths created during the Soviet  years." "To this end, biased historiography, fulfilling political  orders, is attempting to pin the founding of Yerevan solely to the  early 16th century-to the construction of the fortress by Revangulu  Khan-in order to completely erase the centuries-old layers of  civilization that predated it," Simonyan explained.

The Turkologist then presented the key falsifications of Azerbaijani  propaganda. The first thesis, as the analyst noted, is that the  city's history begins in 1504, when the Revan fortress was founded by  order of the Safavid Shah Ismail. The Armenians artificially advanced  the city's age to three millennia by casting concrete walls and  "ancient tombs" in Erebuni in 1984. According to her, this assertion  is easily refuted by solid archaeological evidence. "Excavations on  Arin-Berd Hill began in 1950 under the direction of leading Soviet  archaeologist, Academician Boris Piotrovsky, whose name the  Azerbaijani side, ironically, is trying to exploit. An Urartian  cuneiform inscription discovered in the 1950s, in which King Argishti  I clearly states the date of Erebuni's founding-782 BC-has undergone  international scrutiny and is recognized by global oriental studies,"  the expert explained.

In this regard, she emphasized that presenting restoration work,  which is a natural process for any archaeological site, as "the  construction of a concrete city" is a primitive manipulation,  designed to completely ignore the existence of cuneiform inscriptions  and basalt foundations. Another key falsification, according to her,  concerns the demographics of the Yerevan Fortress and the testimony  of the French traveler Jean Chardin. "Baku propagandists claim that  Chardin, who visited the city in 1673, recorded the presence  exclusively of 'Kizilbash Turks,' while 19th-century Russian sources  and General Gudovich characterized these lands as 'Azerbaijani.' In  reality, Jean Chardin's diaries, as well as European, Ottoman, and  Persian sources from the 17th and 18th centuries, paint a completely  different picture. Chardin clearly notes that the Yerevan Fortress,  as a military garrison and border outpost of the Safavid Empire, was  populated by Persian troops and Turkic-speaking militant tribes,  including the Kizilbash. However, outside the fortress itself-in the  city's neighborhoods, suburbs, and in the commercial and economic  life itself- Armenians constituted the overwhelming majority," the  Turkologist noted.

Moreover, as Simonyan continued, in General Gudovich's official  reports from 1808 and in the archival documents of the Russian  Empire, the terms "Erivan Khanate" or "Azerbaijan" are used  exclusively in a geographical or administrative sense, in the context  of the province of Atropatene. "There is not a single mention of  ethnic 'Azerbaijani lands,' as the ethnonym 'Azerbaijani' as a  self-designation and an administrative-political term emerged only in  the early 20th century. The centuries-old presence of the Armenian  population in the khanate is documented by hundreds of Armenian  churches, monasteries, and khachkars (cross-stones), which existed  long before 1504," the expert concluded.