Anthropological studies show that the current Artsakh (Karabakh) Armenians are the direct physical descendants of the indigenous population of the region.Following the modern consensus among western scholars concerning the origin of the Armenian people, they represent a fusion of the mostly Indo-European natives of the Armenian Plateau(including Artsakh), and the Hurrians of the southernmost Armenian Plateau. According to this theory, from earliest times the Armenian Plateau was inhabited by many ethnic groups. The ethnic character of Artsakh may thus have been originally more diverse than it is now. It is worth noting that Strabo described Armenia (which then included also Artsakh and Utik) in the 1st century BC as "monolingual",though this does not necessarily mean that its population consisted exclusively of ethnic Armenians.
According to the Encyclopædia Iranica, the proto-Armenians had settled as far north as the Kura River by the 7th century BC. In Robert Hewsen's view, until the 6th–5th centuries BC the proto-Armenians lived only in the western half of the Armenian Plateau (in areas between Cappadocia, the Tigris, the Euphrates, and Lake Van) and came to Artsakh and adjacent regions such as Syunik and Utiksomewhat later than the central parts of the Armenian Plateau (as late as the 2nd century BC, as a result of Artaxias I's conquests).While genetical studies claimed and proved that Artsakh also was part of the original proto-Armenian homeland, and that Armenians are the direct descendants of the peoples living in the region 7800 years ago. The conclusion from the studies is that also before the bronze age the population was at the very least mostly Armenian. Although little is known of the other people (except the Armenians) that lived in Artsakh and Utik prior to the putative 2nd-century BC where the region was part of Artaxiad Armenia, Hewsen argues that some names of those tribes (mentioned by Greek, Roman and Armenianauthors) demonstrate that a few of them were not Armenian, nor Indo-European, and that they assimilated into the local Armenians over time.
By medieval times, from at least the 9th century, the population of Artsakh had a strong Armenian national identity. Its people spoke a local Eastern Armenian dialect, the Artsakhian dialect (today known as the Karabakh dialect), which was mentioned by 7th-century grammarian Stepanos Syunetsi in his earliest record of the Armenian dialects․[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] 2A02:3035:E07:4869:9176:34D5:1478:2186 (talk) 16:38, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
- @Olympian loquereI saw you replying to many others on this page, coulld you give your take on this and the other issue i raised?(Also the one withz "Calling the Seljuqs who settled there the ancestors of azerbaijanis" one" 93.200.103.101 (talk) 10:15, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
- @HistoryofIran this comment hasnt been answered for almost an entire year now, so please answer it. 2A00:20:19:E270:A49B:934F:D959:A3B2 (talk) 00:15, 17 March 2025 (UTC)
References
Этническая одонтология СССР (in Russian). Moscow: Nauka. 1979. p. 135. "Eight Millennia of Matrilineal Genetic Continuity in the South Caucasus". Current Biology. June 29, 2017. Archived from the original on 2020-02-04. To shed light on the maternal genetic history of the region, we analyzed the complete mitochondrial genomes of 52 ancient skeletons from present-day Armenia and Artsakh spanning 7,800 years and combined this dataset with 206 mitochondrial genomes of modern Armenians. We also included previously published data of seven neighboring populations (n = 482). Coalescence-based analyses suggest that the population size in this region rapidly increased after the Last Glacial Maximum ca. 18 kya. We find that the lowest genetic distance in this dataset is between modern Armenians and the ancient individuals, as also reflected in both network analyses and discriminant analysis of principal components.
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A total of 19 archaeological sites are represented, covering large parts of Armenia as well as Artsakh (Figure 1), and estimated to be between 300–7800 years old based on contextual dating of artifacts. This time span is accompanied by at least seven well-defined cultural transitions: Neolithic, Chalcolithic, Kura-Araxes, Trialeti-Vanadzor 2, Lchashen-Metsamor, Urartian and Armenian Classical/Medieval (Figure 1).
