Raven Spirit remarked on her strong Armenian matches. As is well known, Cher claimed to be Armenian and Cherokee, though she later seemed to toss out the Cherokee and point to Armenian exclusively.
Here are some pictures and background on Armenians from the first chapter I am currently writing of Cherokee DNA Studies, vol. 2: More Real People Who Proved the Geneticists Wrong
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Armenian woman, 1905-1915. Prokudin-Gorskii Photograph Collection, Library of Congress. Cher in the 1970s. Public domain. Jan Franz in 2008 at her Native American wedding, Yahoo Falls, Kentucky.
Armenians are a distinct, isolated ethno-national group that can hardly be mistaken for any other. Their homeland is a landlocked country at the geographic junction of Europe and the Levant. It is bordered by Georgia, Azerbaijan, Iran and Turkey. The region has acted as a crossroads for human migration from Europe and the Middle East since at least the Neolithic Period and emergence of agriculture. The Armenian people’s unique ethnic stamp was created in the Late Bronze Age and is more European in nature than Middle Eastern. It persisted for three thousand years.
In genetic terms, the isolated cluster we know as Armenian took final shape about 500 years ago when Armenia was divided between the Ottoman Turks and the Safavid Empire in Iran. During the medieval and early modern period, Armenians in the Ottoman Empire became more and more marginalized and were often attacked and enslaved. Although Christian like many other subject peoples in the Islamic state, they suffered more persecution being almost constantly in a war zone.
The Armenian Genocide of 1915 was the culmination of an official policy of eradication pursued over centuries. In the short span of a few years, Turkish authorities killed 1.5 million Armenians, leaving only 400,000 out of an estimated 2 million present on the eve of World War I. The pitiless mass executions caused an explosion of refugees fleeing Turkey. The largest Armenian settlements today are located in Russia, the United States, France, Georgia, Lebanon, Iran, Germany, Syria, Ukraine, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Brazil. There are around 5 million people with full or partial Armenian ancestry situated outside of Armenia. This is more than the number of Armenians who live in their old homeland, which is split between the Republic of Armenia (formerly part of the USSR), Turkey to the west, Georgia to the north, the de facto independent Republic of Artsakh and Azerbaijan to the east, and Iran and Azerbaijan's exclave of Nakhchivan to the south.
The Armenian people are given short shrift in most historical accounts, but there is at least one book where they figure prominently. Johns Hopkins historian and MacArthur Prize recipient Philip D. Curtin in his Cross-Cultural Trade in World devotes an entire chapter to the position of Armenian merchants as carriers of goods, ideas and people between Europe and East Asia. Surprisingly, according to Curtain, the Armenian trade diaspora was more active and influential than that of Jews. The Armenian involvement encompassed both overland as well as maritime routes, reaching from China, India and the Indian Ocean to the Americas.
Armenians are united by a common language, religion (a form of Christianity) and distinct culture. Their language belongs to the Indo-European family, where it constitutes a one-language linguistic group. Experts in the past classified it with Persian, but its separate status and autonomy are now recognized. It was one of the earliest languages in the region to be written and enjoys its own distinctive alphabet with a long-flourishing literature.
The Armenian Church is a venerable one. It originated in the missions of Apostles Bartholomew and Thaddeus in the first century, according to tradition. Armenia was in contact with Rome but had the good fortune to lie outside its frontiers. Partly for this reason, it looked for religious authority within and was separate doctrinally from both the Orthodox Byzantine Empire and Nestorian Christianity, the sect that spread along the trade routes between Rome and China. With the rise of Islam in the Middle East, Armenia became a Christian island in a Muslim sea. Curtin believes that the Armenians’ isolation as a separate religious community underlined the need to deal tactfully with their Muslim neighbors. Such a position probably spelled their commercial success as long-distance traders through Muslim lands.
Strategically placed, though landlocked between the Caspian, Black Sea and Mediterranean, the Armenia acted as a crossroads for trade passing from China and India to Europe and the Near East along the famous Silk Road and other caravan routes and sea lanes. Its phenomenal success was spread over three periods of empire. In the sixth through the ninth centuries BCE, the Armenian kingdom of Urartu enjoyed great prominence. As Rome rose to power in the second century BCE, the Armenian empire controlled all overland trade to and from China, belonging to the Parthian bloc rather than Roman orbit. And finally, in the tenth century CE, Armenia became again prosperous and powerful, its reach extending even to the Mediterranean. Not until it was conquered by the Seljuk Turks in 1070 did Armenia decline. Later, Armenians were confined to a small conquered area and not allowed to visit their former extended lands.
In the meantime, many important Armenian trade colonies developed in the Levant, Constantinople, the Crimea, Russia, Persia and even in cities of Europe like Bruges, Nuremburg and Lisbon. These maintained a distinct Armenianness through contact with the Armenian homeland in the Ottoman Empire. In 1620, there were no fewer than forty Armenian trade houses in Amsterdam alone.
“With the Turkish seizure of Crimea in 1475, many of the Crimean Armenians were forced to move west as refugees into Moldavia, Transylvania and mainly to Galicia, now in southern Poland. In central Europe, they made contact with other Armenian communities in closer touch with the homeland. They therefore changed their culture once more—back to norms more nearly those of contemporaneous Armenia. In spite of many vicissitudes, the Polish and other Armenian settlements in central Europe kept their position in the overland caravan trade till they were finally displaced by railroads in the nineteenth century.”
Such a conjoining of peoples squeezed out of Khazaria, together with Armenians driven eastward into Central Europe, may explain the genetic confusion of Ashkenazi Jews and Armenians first suggested by Eran Elhaik.