Rouben Abrahamian was born in 1881 in the village of Gnishik (modern-day Vayots Dzor Province of Armenia), then part of the Russian Empire.
After his academic spell in Europe, he returned and started teaching Russian, linguistics, and classical philosophy in Yerevan.
[1] Abrahamian's work on this matter was pivotal, for he found important commonalities between the language used in Baba Tahir’s poems and the Jewish dialects of the Iranian cities of Hamadān and Isfahan.
When the University of Tehran was founded in 1935, Abrahamian participated actively in the establishment of its department of Ancient Iranian Languages, where he subsequently started teaching Pahlavi and became head of the faculty as well.
In 1946, following the Iran crisis of 1946, he moved to Soviet Armenia, where he worked at the Institute of Languages at the Academy of Sciences in Yerevan.