Citation: Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 29, 2 (2024) ; 10.1163/26670038-12342799
Nina G. Garsoïan’s accomplishments in her ninety-nine year lifetime were many.1 She was a classically trained pianist. She had degrees in Classical archaeology and Ancient History. She was a professor both of Armenian History and of Byzantine History. She was the first tenured female faculty member in the Department of History at Columbia University. She was the first female Dean of Graduate Studies at Princeton University. She was at home in the study of ancient, Byzantine, and Medieval Armenian history and culture. Certainly, though, it was her contribution to the history of Armeno-Iranian relations in antiquity and the Middle Ages and her re-establishment of the importance of that connection, literally wresting it from the Hellenocentric interpreters, where one of her principal contributions lies.
“If the great Safavid cities failed to enchant me, I was totally overwhelmed by the vision in the neighborhood of Shiraz of the ruins of Persepolis, the Achaemenid tombs cut out of the rock face and the monumental Sasanian reliefs beneath them at Naqsh-I Rustam and Naqsh-I Rajab. … even the relatively small ‘Tomb of Cyrus’ at Parsargadae loomed enormous in the surrounding emptiness. The sight of the overpowering majesty of these monuments finally crystallized my growing interest in ancient Armenia’s great eastern neighbor and overlord and especially my conviction that only the juxtaposition of the surviving visual evidence with the fragmentary textual material could lead to some understanding of the civilization that produced them. It has been an attempt to compensate for the paucity of early Armenian monuments and the all but complete loss of contemporary Persian texts by seeking to read the combination of the surviving accounts of early Armenian historians and the still extant Sasanian monuments as a single illustrated document.”2 You could be forgiven for thinking that this trip was the start of her discussion of Iran and Armenia, but you would be wrong. She credits her friend and the great Armenist Sirarpie Der Nersessian, with many of her future arguments, but to demonstrate how her interest grew, let me use this time to describe Nina Garsoïan the teacher. Nina was one of that small band of scholars responsible for rescuing the study of Armenia in the United States from that horrendous and insulting label, ethnic studies, and successfully repositioning this study into the mainstream of scholarship.3
Now, I began my own study with her in 1968. Let me describe the mise en scene for her two year, once weekly, 2-hour class on Armenian history and culture (and for her Byzantine seminar which followed): You entered her office on the top floor of Kent in the Department of Middle East Language and Cultures. That is where she hung her hat as an Armenist. Nina was also a member of the department of History as a Byzantinist. That split still perplexes me.
You sat, relatively relaxed, facing her as she perched behind a massive yet still institutional wooden desk as she began, precisely on time, and ended precisely on time, with lectures that seamlessly had a start, a middle, and an end. I do not recall a time that my hands did not ache afterwards from my note taking, but I assure you that I am not the only one who has lived off those voluminous notes since then (and some books have even incorporated the riches in those notes).
Yet it was the first lecture which both enthralled and challenged you and which led to all that followed as she traced Armenia’s history from prehistoric times to the year 1928. A detailed bibliography was handed out, one highlighting the primary sources available, but also the relevant secondary sources. And then, on display for that first lecture and throughout was a three dimensional, Defense Mapping Agency contour map of modern Turkey, the Caucasus, and Iran. A two-dimensional map is really not adequate to demonstrate the eternal truth of Armenia’s geopolitical reality – rugged mountain ranges that made east-west movement relatively easy and north south perilous and extremely difficult. Tall mountain passes snowed in for months in the Winter added to the influences on Armenia’s variegated history. And it was during this first lecture that we first heard her enunciate her theory succinctly and perhaps best here: “From antiquity, Armenia’s geographical position at the meeting point of the Greco-Roman and Iranian worlds created a situation that favored the country’s cultural life, enriching it with two major traditions but playing havoc with the continuity of its political history. As a general pattern, therefore, Armenia flourished only when the contending forces on either side were in near equilibrium and neither was in a position to dominate it entirely.”4 Ancillary to this was her interpretation of those closed wintery mountain passes. In times of emergency if one mountain dwelling fell, at least another survived. This came at a price, though: these communities developed apart for those months and much of Armenia’s record of fragmentation and centrifugality against a central administration is owed to this geophysical aspect of its existence.
Armenia’s position between East and West is on full display when we consider the first two 6th century sources that explicitly cite Armenia – the writing of the Greek logographer Hecataeus of Miletus and the victory inscription of Darius the Great a Behistun. The Greek history of Herodotus and the depiction of the Armenians at Persepolis; Armenia as Persian satrapy in the Greek Xenophon’s late 5th century Anabasis. Nina detailed all these and more: the possible influence of the Parthian magus, Tiridates I’s trip to Rome following the 65 AD Peace of Rhandeia to receive the regalia of office from the Roman king Nero on the biblical narrative of the three Magi’s visit to the ethereal king. All these and more were relayed by Nina before her trip of 1970, and the reason is central to her pedagogy: primary sources of all descriptions.
Before Global History was a thing, Nina stressed the importance of gathering and interpreting all the relevant sources from within and without. There is simply no way to study any period of Armenian history without looking to its neighbors, but this is especially true in the ancient era. One did not make apologies for those sources. You let them speak. You gather them; you consider without any theoretical matrix; you reach your conclusions. And if competent scholarship offered valid criticism, you did not dig in and defend, you adapted, you reinterpreted, and this integrity she demonstrated in her 1969 Dumbarton Oaks Paper, “The Paulician History: A reinterpretation,” which took into account the comments and suggestions of her colleagues which she considered and to which she reacted following the publication of her dissertation – The Paulician Heresy.5
Along with the textual record we were given the other relevant tools for the study of Armenia in this same period: archaeology, epigraphy, anthropology, art history along with the caveat which sadly, fifty some years later, is still cogent: the record is incomplete. Most of such data comes from the area of the modern Republic of Armenia, which comprises perhaps only a seventh of historic Armenia.
Persia … Iran … were already a part of her thinking before her trip because the sources were already there. To deny these would be to skew history. Yet, some, for whatever reason, do find it difficult to accept. Nina was one of the first scholars I invited as a Vardanants Day lecturer at the Library of Congress. Her 1995 talk, “Iranian Elements in Early Armenian Christianity,” was well received except for one individual who denounced her as not knowing what she was talking about. So ferocious were this usually mild-mannered person’s accusations, that I ultimately had to quiet him. Nina stood unmoved by this display as she was surrounded by those who had been engaged and enlightened by the talk. Yet far too often legitimate scholarship, whether about Armeno- Iranian studies or other epochs, often meet similar denunciation.
To end: In that same passage which I quoted above from her autobiography Nina writes: “The series of studies begin with the ‘Prolegomena to a Study of the Iranian Elements in Arsacid Armenia’ was to dominate my life for years to come.” That seminal article, published in the influential Armenian Mekhitarist journal, Hantes Amsorea, in 1976 set the tone for her future work: “The political theory known to us from the surviving Persian sources only from the late Sasanian times is attested on the Armenian side from a far earlier Parthian period.” And “Hence, it seems permissible to hazard the hypothesis that a further study of the Iranian components in Arsacid Armenia should provide a guide not only for its own history, but also for an investigation of the Parthian period of Iranian history eradicated from the Persian sources by the antagonism of its Sasanian successors and simultaneously for a study of the gradual de-Hellenization of the astern regions of Asia Minor and the consequent shift in the Oriental cultural balance long before the advent of the Arab invasions.”
I conclude this brief essay on Nina Garsoïan’s contribution to Armeno- Iranian studies by suggesting that it resides not necessarily with the acceptance of her hypotheses and conclusions but rather in the fact that largely through her efforts, the dialogue both on Iranian elements in Armenian history and culture and on the utility of Armenian sources for the study on Iran had now begun.6
Levon Avdoyan
Armenian and Georgian Area Specialist (retired), The Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA
In considering how I could memorialize Nina for the Society for Armenian Studies and its journal I decided against the customary obituary or even a biographical note. Nina herself left us an autobiography (De vita sua. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2011) and there have been several essays and obituaries about her that might be consulted. See, for instance: Dikran Kouymjian, “Nina G. Garsoïan: A Professor Who Incubated Scholars, a Scholar Who Vitalized an Historical Era,” Journal of Armenian Studies, vol. X, nos. 1–2 (2012–2013, pub. 2014): 145–152; and Levon Avdoyan “Magistra Studentorum per Armeniam et Byzantium,” Women Medievalists and the Academy, ed. Jane Chance (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). What you find here is a talk entitled, “Nina Garsoïan’s Contribution to Armeno-Itanian Studies,” that Professor Sebouh Aslanian, Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History at UCLA, asked me to deliver in January of 2019 at his conference on Armenian and Persian History. It presents Nina both as renowned scholar and educator – something that her students and colleagues both knew and valued. I trust this will give you a more personalized impression of one of our great American Armenologists.
Nina Garsoïan, describing her 1970 trip to Iran as part of her year as an International Research and Exchanges Board senior fellow in her 2011 autobiography. See De vita sua, 151f.
With Richard Hovannisian’s death on July 10, 2023, this remarkable band of scholars and educators, which included Nina, Robert Thomson, Robert Hewsen, inter alios, is now completely gone. We are indeed fortunately to have at our disposal their collective seminal works which will survive for generations to come.
Nina G. Garsoïan, “Armenia: History of” in The Dictionary of the Middle Ages: Volume I, ed. Joseph R. Strayer (New York : Scribner, 1982), 474.
Dumbarton Oaks Papers 25 (1971): 85–113.
Based on my partially anecdotal observations slightly before and since Nina’s death, I see that the dialogue continues and her works are integral to it.
