History of Yerevan
[4][5] As noted by Anne Elizabeth, a British scholar from Newcastle University, a number of Armenian toponymies and family names have either retained or contain a certain reminiscence of the earlier substratum.
Earlier, Wilhelm Eilers stated in his records that the Armenian word vank (monastery - translator's note) originated from the verbs erewim/erewec (emerged, appeared).
[1] A document dating from 607 A.D. contains records about Daniel, a priest from Yerevan who, during the First Council of Dvin, relinquished the Chalcedonian creed upon the demand of Catholicos Abraham.
[21] Clifford Edmund Bosworth describes Yerevan as one of those Armenian cities which, located in the Aras River Valley, saw many wars and battles in the Middle Ages.
[23] Also Sebeos, a 7th-century historian, made a reference[1][13] to the city in the form Hērewan (as well as its fortress) in connection with the Arab invasion of Armenia.
[1] In 1047, the fortress was under Byzantine occupation,[25] and several years earlier, it had been seized from the Armenian kingdom of Bagratids by Abu'l-Aswar Shaddadid.
Samuel Anetsi, a 12th-century historian, writes, without reference to earlier sources, about the siege of Yerevan in 660 A.D.[1] A small town under the Bagratids, it developed ties with the neighboring regions in connection with the country's economic progress.
In a record dating from the 13th century, Mekhitar of Ayrivank says[28] that Prince Apirat "... built Kecharus and constructed the channel to Erivani".
[33][13] At the turn of the 13th century, joint Armenian-Georgian troops, relying on the Armenian population's support, liberated the country's entire north from Seljuk invaders.
In the first decades of the 13th century, Yerevan, along with other cities and towns and provinces of north-eastern Armenia, was under the rule of Ivane Zakaryan and his son, Avag.
He was buried in an ancient graveyard currently known as the Kozern Cemetery․[35] Terter Yerevantsi,[36] a medieval Armenian poet, was born in Yerevan in the late 13th century.
It was in that period that the Qara Qoyunlu leader, Iskander, appointed a descendent of the Orbelian family[40] the head of Yerevan with jurisdiction over the entire Ayrarat province.
[3] From the 16th century onwards, Yerevan remained a key regional city, becoming the center of Persian rule of Eastern Armenia.
The name Yerevan was featured also in the 16th century Ottoman-Safavid conflicts, when both sides battled for control over the entire Eastern Armenia.
After the seizure of Kars and Nakhichevan in 1554, the Ottoman's conquered Yerevan, massacring a great number of residents and burning part of the city.
He called his Nakharars (ministers - translator's note) to himself and appointed some of them as overseers and middlemen for residents of the country so as every prince, accompanied by his troops, could dispossess and expel the population of one gavar.
[44] Dariusz Kołodziejczyk writes: "Following the brilliant anti-Ottoman campaign of 1603-5, Shah ʿAbbās resumed control over the provinces of Yerevan and Nakhchivan, which constituted the core settlement of Eastern Armenians.
As a result, the major centre of Armenian religious and cultural life, the Holy See of Etchmiadzin, again fell within the borders of the Safavid Empire.
Yet, feeling that his grasp over the newly conquered territories was still insecure, ʿAbbās applied a scorched earth policy and undertook massive forced resettlements of the local population, especially Armenians, into central Iran" .
Finally, under the 1639 Peace Treaty of Zuhab, Eastern Armenia, including Yerevan, passed into the Persian zone for almost a century.
The city resumed its role of a major trade center on the caravan roads, as evidenced by recounts of western travelers.
The latter was ruled by different Khans who, in the period of the mid-18th century Persian Revolt, were every now and then subjected to King Irakli II of Georgia or Panah-khan and Ibrahim-khan of Karabakh, both seeking to expand their influence on the Caucasus.
Yerevan was later subjected to the official sovereigns of Eastern Armenia, Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar and his successor, Fath-Ali Shah.
The Meliks of Yerevan maintained a full administrative, legislative and judicial power over their people, their authority extending to the issuance of execution verdicts (which were subject to an approval by the sardar).
The urban and architectural model of Yerevan conformed to the general schemes and designs acceptable in the cities and towns of the Near East.
[1] Georgia's unification with Russia and the first Russian-Persian war (1804) again made Yerevan a strategic center of the Persian defense in the Caucasus.
The city's big fortress, located on a high altitude and surrounded by massive walls and ammunition, resisted, for a certain period, the Russian incursion.
Under Russian domination, Yerevan in fact remained a single storey city of clay houses with flat roofs.
The loss of Yerevan's commercial and strategic status precluded it from the economic development processes going on in several other cities across the Caucasus.
After the Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent civil war in Russia, as well as the establishment of the Republic of Armenia in 1918 (with Erivan serving as its capital), the city became the center of all Armenian hopes for the coming two and a half years.
