Cultural Interactions in the Near East: Some Observations from the Armenian Experience

Cultural exchange is a constant process governed by no fixed rules, working independently of the will of the societies involved. It is difficult to grasp all the give and take between distant or even neighboring traditions because of the vastness of the process and the complications associated with human interactions on an international scale. Yet, cultural interaction is a, perhaps the, essential component of world civilization.

Scholarship continues, nevertheless, to isolate and examine discrete moments of exchange between cultural zones. In this essay I propose to re-examine a number of instances of such contacts between traditions. In the three examples which follow, I would like to reflect on the broader implications of recent research on medieval Armenian historyand art, particularly about the interaction of cultures, the integration of new external elements into a tradition, the use of scholarship developed in one domain in that of another.

I. The Scaenae frons

A case of exchange from the earlier period of Roman imperial culture into Byzantine and Armenian art provides an interesting case study. W. Friend and Kurt Weitzmann have discussed the appearance in middle-Byzantine book painting, especially in the backgrounds of certain portraits of the Evangelists, a series of parallel columns often interrupted in the center by an impressive arch.[2] This element was identified as the scaenae frons used in Roman theaters at the back of the proscenium, and having a central entry way, the Porto Regia, with its large curtain through which the main characters passed. Several such theaters are still preserved in North Africa. According to Weitzmann, the scaenae frons was not used in early Christian art, but only introduced into Byzantine art during the strong classical revival of the Macedonian Renaissance of the tenth and eleventh centuries.

The motif occurs several times in early Armenian manuscript painting. Its most well known appearance is in two portraits, Luke and John, from the Mlk'e Gospels date 862. Unfortunately, little attention has been given to them, because until recently, the Mlk'e miniatures were thought to be from the tenth century and thus probably based on post-iconoclastic Byzantine models. The motif, however, appears as early as the late sixth-early seventh century where it has gone unnoticed in an Armenian painting of the Presentation of the Magi bound into the Etchmiadzin Gospels. It reappears later several times -- both in portrait and narrative miniatures -- in the Mugna Gospels copied in the second half of the eleventh century in the Armenian royal capital, Ani.

This borrowing was carried out by Armenian artists from the same classical sources used by their Byzantines counterparts. The two older Armenian examples -- the Etchmiadzin and Mlk'é Gospels -- show that the motif had in fact already entered Christian art in the pre-Iconoclastic period. Its use in the Presentation of the Magi scene and later in the Annunciation, Presentation, and the Last Supper of teh Mugna Gospels, might even suggest that events from the Gospel narrative were performed or recited in early centuries in a theatrical setting. Yet, in terms of our pursuit of the interaction of cultural themes, there is another lesson to be learned from the scaenae frons, one that is true about an enormous amount of cultural interaction. The element disappeared totally in both Byzantine and Armenian art after the eleventh century, in part because its stylization became ever more decorative and its original significance lost, misunderstood and finally abandoned.

II. Akhi-futuwwa & the Armenian Brotherhood of Erzinjan

Some years ago I suggested that the Statutes (Kanon) prepared by Hovhannes of Erzinjan for the Armenian Brotherhood [(Y)eghbayrut'iwn from (y)eghbayr, brother] of that city in 1280 represented the equivalent of an Akhi-nâmah in the Islamic tradition of Asia Minor.[3] No such Akhi-nâmah has until now been identified. There are, however, a number of Futuwwa-nâmahs describing personal rules necessary for the virtuous life that akhîs -- urban dwellers, merchants, craftsmen and professionals.-- as well as ghazis, sufis, and others were to follow. The moral commandments of the Armenian Brotherhood, the so-called personal rules, are similar to those of the futuwwa: love God, honor parents and clergy, keep yourself holy and virgin until marriage, do not commit adultery after marriage, pray three times every day (men genuflecting twelve times, women twenty), go to church Saturday and Sunday and keep the church holidays, confess on Sunday and wait forty days to take communion, keep your tongue pure, strengthen your organs not to see or hear evil.

According to Claude Cahen the lack of akhî-nâmahs was due to the personal interest of the literate classes that monopolized letters.[4] They were from the religious and mystical camp, thus oriented toward the higher moral principals, rather than the political or practical, which would have inspired an akhî-nâmah. Among Armenians, literacy in the thirteenth century was also still a privilege of the clergy, yet contrary to Cahen's reasoning, the members of the Armenian Brotherhood had no difficulty soliciting a codification of their rules from Hovhannes, an important priest.

The efficient role of the akhîs in guaranteeing the continuity of municipal government in Asia Minor after the collapse of Seljuk and Ilkhanid power in the early fourteenth century is described by the north African traveller Ibn Battûta. Ahkîs were well organized and seemed to be present in nearly all urban environments of Asia Minor.

I believe that if some day we were to discover rules of an Islamic akhî association, an akhî-nâmah, that it would be similar to the Statutes of the Armenian Brotherhood of Erzinjan, which contain rules governing conduct between brothers of a practical nature and a description of the organization of the fraternity. The Armenian Statutes can be summed up thus: The Brotherhood was made up of younger men (though women seemed not to be excluded) guided by Christian charity, whose major function was to protect fellow members from the threats of tyrants and wicked men, and to assist them when defunct or bankrupt, in poverty or sickness, and in death. They were to help the poor, to be hospitable to fellow brothers both within the city and without, to receive strangers from all nations and approach all with love and openness. They were to serve together to defend the city, like its very walls. In a final section we learn that the Brotherhood was organized in a para-military fashion, in subunits of ten with a "head" (glux) and four of these, that is forty brothers, made up the principle unit led by a "great" (mec) brother. There were senior (awag) and junior or initiate (krtser) brothers; the entire organization had a governing body of the "chief brothers".

In terms of the interaction of Muslim akhîs and Armenian yeghbayrs we might begin by asking which of these groups had the earlier origin? But in the context of city life in Anatolia or Armenia of the period the answer is of little importance. The Islamic akhî experience as an organized phenomenon seems to date from the thirteenth century, though individuals bearing the title are known from an earlier period. The Armenian Brotherhoods were wide spread in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in cities of Asia Minor and Iran but also among diasporan communities in the Crimea and Poland.

Our earliest testimony for such an Armenian organization with clear features of self defense and common and united action dates from the 1120s. Matthew of Edessa describes how Armenian merchants in Antioch, when menaced by a hostile crowd, had only to give a special signal for all the members to assemble, quickly control the situation, and avert the potential danger. The use of a signal and the mention of exactly eighty protectors in Matthew's text, recall the rules of self-defense in the Statutes of 1280 in which members were organized in super-units of forty.

The existence of such urban fraternities, especially among merchants, was natural. As an instrument of solidarity against external dangers, they were particularly useful when there was a weak central government or no government at all. With the collapse of Armenian self-rule in the eleventh century and the failure to reestablish it except in the southern kingdom of Cilicia during the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, the Armenian population, living under the rule of a variety of mostly Islamic sovereigns, was left on its own.

In the chaotic circumstances caused by the weakening of the central states and the fragmentation of power in the post-Seljuk and post-Mongol period there was a sort of environmental exigency to develop appropriate forms of urban social organization like the akhîs and the Brotherhoods. In these circumstances, familiarity of the Armenian Brotherhoods by Islamic historians is as important for the understanding of the organization of the akhî groups as is the study of the futuwwa prior to its Ottoman transformation to Armenian scholars for a correct perspective on the Brotherhoods.

But another dimension of this urban interaction among different religious groups in Asia Minor is suggested by the Armenian Brotherhoods. Speros Vryonis in his The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor an the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century (1971) suggests that a good portion of conversions of urban Christians -- he is mainly interested in the Greek population -- to Islam was motivated by their desire to have access to akhî brotherhoods for purely commercial reasons.[5] Had the information on Armenian brotherhoods been more generally available for his study he might have formulated a different hypothesis, for evidence he used to support this point is rather sparse. Should sufficient proof be forthcoming someday to demonstrate that many urbanized Greeks converted to Islam to more fully share in the benefits of an akhî-type organization, the Statutes of the Armenian Brotherhood of Erzinjan make it abundantly clear that Armenians in the same regions were able to enjoy all the benefits of an akhî-like organization without conversion.

Were there any real exchanges between Islamic akhîs and Armenian brothers? It is a question the examination of which should tempt specialists in Islamic and Armenian economic and social history.

This example of interaction changes into a somewhat different relationship in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the Turkish fütüvvet became closely and almost exclusively associated with trade guilds. The Armenian Brotherhoods gradually disappeared and Armenian craftsmen were allowed to enter the trade guilds controlled by the Ottoman fütüvvet. The result was conversion to Islam as bemoaned by an Armenian from Erzerum, Urakh Grigor in 1709, in a text only just published and commented on by the late Hagop Anasian. By then, however, the Armenian khodja merchant class had become well established everywhere. These khodjas, perhaps more than any other factor, helped Armenian urban society enter the modern world as early as the seventeenth century, but that is another unexplored chapter of Middle Eastern history.[6]

III. Chinese Influences

Exchanges between cultures are usually more easily traced in art: One can visualize the innovation and trace its path. In 1286 and 1287, a few years after the Statutes of Erzinjan were written, a number of Chinese animals suddenly make their appearance in the decoration of Armenian manuscripts copied and illuminated in the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia. A single Chinese dragon is shown on the lining of the cope of Archbishop Hovhannes, the younger brother of king Het'um and Smbat the Constable. He is seen ordaining a young priest in a Gospel copied in 1287 at the monastery of Akner. The other examples are found in the decoration of two title pages of the Lectionary of prince Het'um, grandson of Het'um I, copied a year earlier in 1286. The first shows a young Christ Emmanuel flanked by two Chinese lions, below which are another pair of lions in a different position, and under them, open mouth dragon heads. On another page we fine an heraldic phoenix above a tri-lobe arch and the dragon-phoenix motif, so popular to Chinese art, in which the animals are shown fighting over a pearl. This configuration was the inspiration behind the Armenian example, the missing pearl would have been represented just between their open mouths.

The integration of these motifs is so successful, in a context of exuberance and the fantastic of these miniatures, that they fit perfectly naturally in their decor. Beyond their purely artistic interest, they challenge us to trace the trail of their entry into Armenia. The precise rendering of these animals confirms that they were copied from authentic Chinese objects brought into the kingdom either through trade or as royal presents, or both.

I have discussed the subject at great length elsewhere.[7] Today these fabulous beasts interest me as interactive elements between several cultures: (1) Chinese, the source of their origin, (2) Mongol, the channel of their migration, and (3) Armenian and Persian-Islamic, the art of their adoption. Islamic artists were greatly attracted by Chinese motifs and style. Chinoiseries enriched and even transformed the aesthetic imagination of ceramics and miniature painting especially in Iran. Timurid and Savafid court art was particularly successful in integrating these Far Eastern elements, but that was to happen well after our thirteenth century Armenian examples.

The Mongols conquered the Near East in successive stages in the second and third quarters of the thirteenth century. With the fall of the Abbasid caliphate and the capture and destruction of Baghdad by Hulagu, the Ilkhan, in 1258, Mongol rule became dominant in Iran, Iraq, Armenia and Asia Minor for nearly a century. Yet even prior to the beginning of direct Ilkhanid rule, the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia had concluded an alliance with the Great Khan in Qaraqorum after the visit of Smbat, the Constable of Armenia in the late 1240s, and then his brother, the Armenian king Het'um, between 1253 and 1256. This alliance was used by Armenian rulers to ward-off the constant threat of the Seljuks of Rum to the northwest and the newly established Mamluk sultans in Egypt and Syria to the southeast. For fifty years the Armenian rulers of Cilicia were able to profit from their pact with the Mongols. During this period visits were made by Armenian kings and officials to the centers of Mongol authority, not only in Central Asia, but also in Iran. Each time gifts were exchanged. Among those received by the Armenians were certainly objects manufactured in China, a land also ruled by the Mongols. The motifs on these luxury gifts, whether silks or ceramics, were copied by the highly skilled Armenian artists working in the monastic scriptoria directly under royal patronage.

The Ilkhanids did not convert to Islam until the reign of Ghazan Khan, around 1300. Only after that date are Chinese motifs seriously used on Islamic ceramics and in miniature painting. It is sometime, however, before they are well integrated, appearing particularly stiff in such early illustrations as those of the Manâfi^c al-hayawân in the Pierpoint Morgan Library, or the copies of Jamî al-tavârîkh of Rashîd ad-Dîn in Edinburgh and London. The very earliest successful Iranian use of dragons and phoenixes are on a series of excavated titles, perhaps produced at Kâshân, that once decorated the walls of a chamber in the summer palace of Abaqa Khan at Takht-i Sulaymân. Like the Armenian miniatures they probably date to the 1280s, but it should be remembered they are associated with a purely Mongol, non-Islamic complex.

The importance of the Armenian use of Chinese elements is not that it was earlier than that of the neighboring Islamic tradition, because as with the akhîs and the yeghbayrs, the moment was really the same, both traditions using the Mongol connection to get to the art of the Far East.

The interesting exercise in this instance of interaction involving four cultures, is to examine the enduring influence on the art of the borrowers. Muslim painting remained under the spell of Chinese art for centuries. In the late Mongol period the fascination with Far Eastern aesthetics resulted in the gradual elaboration of a new, dynamic style in manuscript illumination. At first the motifs are dealt with artificially, but within a generation the effects are treated more gracefully, producing the remarkable miniatures associated with the Demotte Shâhnâmah and in mid-fourteenth century Kâshân and "Sultânâbâd" ceramics. Islamic painting under successive Ilkhanid, Timurid and Safavid dynasties reflected a constant borrowing and a gradually more sophisticated and harmonious absorption of the motifs and artistic conventions of China. The cumulative result of this process was the production of masterpieces such as the sixteenth century Houghton Shâhnâmah, which stands as witness to the profundity and persistence of the Chinese influence on Islamic art.

In Armenian art the experience was just the opposite, Chinese elements were still-born. The animals -- dragons, phoenixes -- in their oriental forms are abandoned after their use in the Lectionary of Het'um II. And what I have interpreted elsewhere as possible stylistic experiments based on Chinese painting, especially in landscape rendering, found in Armenian manuscripts of the 1280s and 1290s, also disappeared altogether before 1300.[8]

The cause for this was not artistic rejection, but rather the rapid decline of the Armenian kingdom due to the increasing power of the Mamluks, the weakening of Ilkhanid authority, and the end of the Armeno-Mongol alliance after Ghazan Khan's conversion to Islam. The wealth of the Armenian kingdom, derived from east-west trade through its ports on the Mediterranean Sea, sharply declined depriving artists of the high level of patronage requisite for the survival of a dynamic art, whereas Islamic court patronage continually flourished.

In this instance of cultural interaction, the Armenian and the Islamic experiences with Chinese art, even though they occurred in the same place at the same time and by way of the same intermediary, were totally different. There is, however, another facet to borrowings between civilizations illustrated by both the example of Chinese motifs and the urban fraternities already examined. Armenian art got its chinoiserie directly from the same source as Islamic art, and the Armenian brotherhoods were developed by a stateless Christian minority scattered in a Muslim milieu as a response to the same needs that motivated the formation of akhî groups. In the thirteenth century medieval Armenian culture was still vigorous, sophisticated and had an independent life. In the interaction between civilizations, contrary to what may appear to be the more logical premise, as the two case histories show, it is not always the smaller and politically helpless minority that borrows, perforce, from the culture of the larger, dominant power.

Each of the examples chosen for this discussion requires a view from outside the Armenian experience for a proper analysis. They are but three from the hundreds which make up the web of cultural exchange. For a century and a half linguists and philologists have carefully established the various instances of massive borrowing of vocabulary from the languages -- Greek, Hurrian, Iranian, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Turkish -- of the peoples Armenians have co-mingled with. If language is so indebted to outside influences, it is only natural that traditions, myths and cultural values had to have been equally affected. If there is a general lesson to be drawn from these examples it is one we as scholars know and preach, but, because we are too absorbed in the very details of the investigation, often forget or ignore: namely, to look elsewhere to other areas and disciplines, for fuller answers to our problems and for the universal meanings of our intellectual pursuits.

Just as it is necessary to learn the intricacies of classical and oriental languages to productively engage in Armenian studies, so is it imperative to look beyond Armenia to both East and West for a better understanding of the cultural and artistic currents which contributed to its historical development.

          Dickran Kouymjian
          Haig & Isabel Berberian Professor of Armenian Studies
          Director, Sarkis & Meliné Kalfayan Center for Armenian Studies
          California State University, Fresno

[1] Parts of this article were presented during a lecture at Columbia University in April 1991.

[2] A. M. Friend, "The Portraits ofthe Evangelists in Greek and Latin Manuscripts," Art Studies, 2 (1929), p. 9 ff; Kurt Weitzmann, "The Character and Intellectual Origin of the Macedonian Renaissance," Studies in Classical and Byzantine Manuscript Illumination, ed. H. Kessler, Chicago-London, 1971, pp.196-7. For further references and a general discussion see Dickran Kouymjian, "The Scaenae Frons in Armenian Art: The Classical Tradition in the East," Byzantium and the Classical Tradition, M. Mullett and R. Scott, eds., Birmingham, England, 1981, pp. 155-171, and "The Classical Tradition in Armenian Art," Revue des Etudes Arméniennes, vol. XV (1981), pp. 331-356.

[3] D. Kouymjian, "The Canons Dated 1280 A.D. of the Armenian Akhî-type Brotherhood of Erzinjan," Actes du XXIXe congrès international des orientalistes, Paris, 1973, Paris, 1975, part I, vol. 2, pp. 107-115.

[4] Claude Cahen, articles "Akhî" and "Futuwwa," in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition.

[5] S. Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor an the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century, Berkeley,1971, esp. pp. 396-402.

[6] I have discussed this question in a paper entitled "From Disintegration to Reintegration: Armenians at the Start of the Modern Era (XVIth-XVIIth Centuries)" read at a Paris conference entitled "Les Arméniens face à l'Occident et la question de la moderité - XVIe-XXe siècles," organized by the Association Internationale des Études Arméniennes in June 1986 and more recently in another paper entitled "Armenia in the Age of Columbus" given at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association in Portland Oregon, October 1992. I hope to publish the material I have collected on the khodjas in the near future.

[7] D. Kouymjian, "Chinese Influences on Armenian Miniature Painting in the Mongol Period," Armenian Studies/Etudes arméniennes: In Memoriam Haïg Berbérian, D. Kouymjian,editor, Lisbon: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 1986, pp. 415-468.

Cultural Interactions in the Near East: Some Observations from the Armenian Experience[1]

Cultural Interactions in the Near East: Some Observations from the Armenian Experience [1]