Name of Armenia


The name Armenia enters English via Latin, from Ancient Greek for the Armenian people and country is hayer and Hayastan, respectively. The exact etymologies of the names of Armenia are unknown, and there are various speculative attempts to connect them to older toponyms or ethnonyms.

Armenia/Armenians

Armenia and Armenians are the most common names used internationally to refer to the country Armenia and the Armenian people. Armenians themselves do not use it while speaking Armenian, making it an exonym.

Etymology

Multiple theories and speculations exist about the origin of the name Armenia, but no consensus has been reached by historians and linguists. Armenologist Nicholas Adontz has rejected some of the speculations in his 1946 book.'
The earliest unambiguous and universally accepted attestation of the name dates to the 6th century BC, from the trilingual Behistun Inscription, where the names ', Harminuya, and Urashtu and their equivalent demonyms are used in reference to Armenia and people from Armenia. In Greek, .

From Indo-European ''*ar-''

Some authors have connected Armenia to the Indo-European root *ar- meaning "to assemble".

From ''Armani'' and/or ''Armânum''

Early 20th century Armenologists have suggested that Old Persian a-r-mi-i-n and the Greek Armenoi are continuations of an Assyrian toponym Armânum or Armanî. There are certain Bronze Age records identified with the toponym in both Mesopotamian and Egyptian sources. The earliest is from an inscription which mentions Armânum together with Ibla as territories conquered by Naram-Sin of Akkad in c. 2250 BC identified with an Akkadian colony in the Diarbekr region. Many historians, such as Wayne Horowitz, identify Armanî which was conquered by Naram-Sin of Akkad, with the Syrian city of Aleppo.
Armenia has also been claimed as a variant of Urmani, attested epigraphically in an inscription of Menuas of Urartu.

From ''Har-Minni''

Alternatively, Armenia is interpreted by some as ḪARMinni, that is, "the mountainous region of the Minni". Minni is also a Biblical name of the region, appearing in the Bible alongside Ararat and Ashchenaz, probably the same as the Minnai of Assyrian inscriptions, corresponding to the Mannai. The Elamite name for Armenia was inscribed as har-mi-nu-ya.

From ''Erimena''

The name Erimena appears in Urartian inscriptions as the father of king Rusa III, which can be interpreted to mean "Rusa, son of the Armenian".

''Armen'' tribe hypothesis

There have been further speculations as to the existence of a Bronze Age tribe of the Armens, either identical to or forming a subset of the Hayasa-Azzi. In this case, Armenia would be an ethnonym rather than a toponym. Attestations of such a tribe have never been found.

From ''Aram'' and/or ''Arame''

has an eponymous ancestor, Aram, a lineal descendant of Hayk, son of Harma and father of Ara the Beautiful. A much older Aram, the son of Shem, is also mentioned from the Book of Genesis, Historian Flavius Josephus, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, as being the sovereign over "all the land of Mesopotamia between the Tigris and the Euphrates to the north of the Chaldees to the border of the mountains of Asshur and the land of 'Arara." is sometimes equated with Arame of Urartu, the earliest known king of Urartu. The endonym Hayk’ in the same tradition is traced to Hayk himself.
The names Armen and Arman, feminine Arminé, are common given names by Armenians. Armin is also a Persian given name.

Hayastan/Hayk/Hayer

use names derived from the stem hay- as their endonym. Hay and Hayer is used to refer to the Armenian people. Hayastan is used to refer to their country, while Hayk was used historically and is still used today romantically.

Etymology

From ''Hatti''

According to Diakonoff, the ethnonym may derive from the unattested Proto-Armenian name *hatiyos or *hatyos → *hayo → hay, related to Urartian ????, from Hittite ??. In the Armenian language, the Proto-Indo-European intervocalic *-t- drops and yields /y/. Compare ' → *hatir → *hayir → '. Other examples include ' → ' → *ayr → ', ' → .
The name Ḫāte was given by Urartians to all lands west of Euphrates, including the territory around Malatya. Diakonoff theorizes that when the Urartians were assimilated among the Proto-Armenians, they took over their Indo-European language and called themselves by the same name of the "Hittites".

From ''Hayasa''

Others suggest that the etymology of the hay- stem derives from the name of a realm in proximity to the Armenian Highlands called Ḫayaša.
The presumption is that the name Hayk' would derive from Hayasa, but Diakonoff considers this "not provable and in its very essence not probable." According to Kapantsjan, the suffix -sa in Hayasa as the ancient Luwian toponymical suffix -ssas, widely in use throughout all of Anatolia, but this suffix is not present in the Armenian language. It is also argued that the initial ḫ in Ḫayaša yielding /h/ in Armenian is improbable.

From ''Haik''

According to Armenian historiographic tradition, the endonym Hayk’ comes from the legendary eponymous ancestor of the Armenian nation, Hayk.

Somkheti/Somekhi

This form, and forms derived from it, is used by Georgians and some peoples of the Caucasus.

Etymology

According to Diakonoff, the name is derived by metathesis from the name of the country called Suḫmu in Akkadian and Zuhma in Hittite, located in the upper Euphrates valley, close to South-Caucasian tribes, and is presumed to have been inhabited by Proto-Armenians.

Ararat/Urartu

Used historically as a synonym for Armenia, in the forms of Urartu in the Assyrian dialect of Akkadian and Urashtu in the Babylonian dialect, as well as Ararat in Biblical Hebrew. The name Ararat was changed to Armenia in the Bible as early as the 1st century AD in historiographical works and very early Latin translations. This name was attested as Uruatri as early as the 13th century BC by Assyrian king Shalmaneser I, and it was used interchangeably with Armenia until the last known attestation from the 5th century BC by Xerxes in his XV Inscriptions. Sometime during the early periods of Classical Antiquity, the use of Urartu declined and was fully replaced with Armenia. The name continued to be used in the form of Ayrarat for the central province of Ancient Armenia, as a scarcely used alternative name for the First Republic of Armenia, and for a short-lived and self-proclaimed Kurdish state known as the Republic of Ararat. Today, Ararat is used as one of the names given to the twin-peaked mountain in the Armenian Highlands, in modern-day Turkey, and for a province by the same name in the Republic of Armenia. It's also a common given name used by Armenians.

Modern names