The incorporation of the Armenia within the Mongol Empire ushered in a period of relative political stability as well as of economic and cultural activity in the second half of the 13th through the early 14th century. The period following the collapse of the Il-Khanate in the fourteenth century, however, was marked by political instability that culminated in the economically devastating invasions of Timur at the end of that century. Despite the change in the political and economic fortunes of the region, scholarly and textual production remained high in certain monastic communities in the province of Siwnik‘ at the eastern end of Armenia and in the monasteries along the shore of Lake Van further west. A remarkable characteristic of these communities is the intensity of regional communication that linked them to each other across the Armenian plateau as well as to Iran, the Crimea, and the Mediterranean coast. This paper will argue that these communities were able to take advantage of lines of trade and communication successfully established during the pax Mongolica and across which texts and scholars as well as goods and merchants travelled. This interaction kept members of the monastic communities informed about regional intellectual, political and economic developments in which they were engaged. In addition, the large amount of travelling many of the members of these monastic communities undertook either for spiritual, political, or educational purposes helped inculcate a broader cultural vision than the remote location of the institutions would suggest. The texts and traditions codified in the monasteries of Siwnik‘ and Lake Van during this period are particularly important as from these areas they were eventually brought to Constantinople where in the eighteenth century they emerged as the intellectual and religious cornerstone of the Armenian Church. The scholarly output of these institutions underscores once again the enduring significance, even if indirect, of the Mongol Empire for the development of Eurasian culture.

As part of a larger work, this study seeks to explore avenues of literary ‘interaction’ in medieval Armenian, Persian, and Turkish literature by expanding a moment during the late 13th through 15th centuries, when Armenian, Persian, and Turkish speakers responded to an immeasurably vast Arabic discourse on strangers and strangeness. The Arabic and Persian gharib, or foreigner/stranger, traveling across not only geographic but also linguistic frontiers, became indigenized in Armenian and Turkish literatures with the rise of ‘vernacular’ poetry in both languages. While an excellent survey of Arabic gharib literature exists thanks to Franz Rosenthal, there is currently no scholarship which takes into account the unnoticed story of the gharib's peregrinations across multiple Middle Eastern literatures and languages. Consequently, no current study is positioned to ask how we might understand the migrations of discourses across a heteroglossic cultural landscape in light of the traveling gharib. My paper will primarily focus on the work of four authors: Jal?l ad-D?n R?m? (d. 1273), the author of the Mathnaw?-ye Ma'naw?, one of the most famous works of Persian mystical poetry; Y?nus Emre, another Sufi poet who probably died around 1320 and was also one of the first authors to compose Sufi poetry in the Oghuz Turkish language; Frik, who was born in the 13h century, probably died in the early 14th century, and is likely the first author we know of who composed poetry in vernacular Armenian instead of Classical Armenian; and finally Mkrtich’ Naghash (d. around 1475), the Armenian bishop of Diyarbak?r, who left home after the destruction of his church and traveled westward, where he witnessed firsthand what life was like for scattered Armenians abroad. I have included Naghash, who comes about a hundred years after the major proliferation of the concept of the “gharib” in Sufi discourse during the late 13th and 14th centuries, in order to show how what began as a minor concern with Frik (whose poems contain one of the first, albeit quite brief, appearance of the word “gharib” in Armenian literature) became a central concern of Naghash's poetry. In so doing, I will examine the various ways that literatures develop alongside, in concert with, and against one another.

This paper considers the material and literary evidence for sundials in medieval Transcaucasia, and asks what they might contribute to our knowledge of interrelations between the cultures of Armenia and Georgia. My presentation constitutes the preliminary stages of a long-term project concerning a neglected subject. The tradition of sundial construction developed early in medieval Transcaucasia: the first dated examples are preserved from the seventh century. By the thirteenth, they routinely appear on the south façades of churches. Although a complete corpus of dials has yet to be attempted (and forms the goal of the projected study), over thirty examples from medieval Armenia alone have been published thus far, a number which surely reflects only a fraction of the total surviving. The sundials are typically (invariably?) of the semi-circular “protractor” format. Protractor dials are much less complex than classical instruments like those on the Tower of the Winds in Athens, which were calibrated according to latitude and showed both the passing of the hours, as indicated by the gnomon’s edge, and also marked the seasons, as shown by the gnomon’s point. Classical diallers understood the axial tilt of the earth and accounted for it in the construction of their devices. If the gnomon were inserted perpendicularly to the wall, as it appears to have been in the Armenian cases, the dials offered accurate readings on two days of the year at the most: the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. Yet mathematical analyses constitute only one approach to the sundial. What do the Transcaucasian sundials reveal about shared attitudes towards time, about the shape of the liturgical day, and about the role of architecture in chronometry? Are sundials in Armenia and Georgia distinct from each other and how? In considering these questions, I hope to offer a new perspective on a longstanding discussion surrounding the relationship of Armenian and Georgian architectural traditions. What happens when the gnomonic evidence is taken into consideration? These questions constitute the first step toward locating Transcaucasian dials within an even wider cultural landscape: the subject of another, future study.

Although Arab incursions into Armenia began c. 640, it wasn’t until the rise of the Marwanids that the province Arminiya, a catch-all toponym to designate the Arab conquests in the South Caucasus, came under the direct control of the caliphate. The position of Arminiya as a frontier against the Byzantines and the Khazars required that the land not only be conquered by Muslim armies and home to Muslim settlers, but that it should be relevant to the Islamic world in a more profound manner. We therefore find descriptions of mosques and Islamic shrines in Arminiya, as well as stories that link Arminiya to the Qur’anic narrative and Prophetic tradition. Geographers, exegetes, and historians of the Islamic world described Arminiya as significant to both caliphal history and the apocalyptic future of the Muslim community. The political and military frontier between Islam and Byzantium was thus reinforced by a conceptual border, one which delineated a distinct difference between Arm?niya and her Greek neighbors. This paper will examine the role of the sectarian milieu in the development of an Islamic identity for Arminiya by considering references to the province in Qur’anic exegesis. In short, the sacralization of the province required the internalization and domestication of relevant Christian beliefs, most especially those related to Alexander the Great, as isra’iliyyat. Legendary histories and Biblical exegesis familiar to Greek, Armenian, and Georgian Christian discourse surface in the Islamic setting in a new manner. The Islamic reconceptualization of “the North” and associated traditions are seen through the lens of Sasanian history, mitigated through Syriac and Persian literature rather than relying solely on Armenian or Greek sources. Arab and Persian authors also demonstrate familiarity with pre-Islamic Iranian cosmography, also possibly via Syriac intermediary sources, which they utilize to explicate Qur’anic passages. Both of these trends reveal the enduring relevance of Sasanian hegemony in the Caucasus and, by extension, Islamic claims to political legitimacy as heirs to the Persianate world. Although there are indications of early dialogue between Arabs and Armenians, Islamic narratives about Arminiya derived from polyvocal cross-cultural encounters in the Near East involving not merely Arabs and Armenians, but also Syrians and Persians.