In the sixteenth century the whole Near Eastern world, from the gates of Vienna[[212]] to the gates of Aleppo and Tabriz, found itself united under a single masterful Government, and once more Armenia was linked securely with the West. From 1514 onwards the great majority of the Armenian nation was subject to the Osmanli State. It is true that the province of Erivan (on the middle course of the Aras) was recovered by the Persians in the seventeenth century, and held by them till its cession to Russia in 1834. But, with this exception, the whole of Armenia remained under Osmanli rule until the Russians took Kars, in the war of 1878. These intervening centuries of union and pacification were, on the whole, beneficial to Armenia; but with the year 1878 there began a new and sinister epoch in the relations between the Osmanli State and the Armenian nation.
[191]. There seems to be no available name to convey the Janus-character of this region. “Balkan” has all the connotation, but the word is allocated already to a much too limited geographical area. “Levantine” covers a wider geographical field, but suggests merely the superficial characteristics which the Near Eastern peoples share with many others in a certain transient stage of development.
[192]. The limits of the Near East are not easy to define. On the north-west, Vienna is the most conspicuous boundary-mark, but one might almost equally well single out Trieste or Lvov or even Prag. Towards the south-east, the boundaries are even more shadowy. It is perhaps best to equate them with the frontiers of the Arabic language, yet the genius of the Near East overrides linguistic barriers, and encroaches on the Arabic-speaking world on the one side as well as on the German-speaking world on the other. Syria is essentially a Near Eastern country, and a physical geographer would undoubtedly carry the Near Eastern frontiers up to the desert belt of the Sahara, Nefud and Kevir.
[193]. There is one physical type, classified by ethnologists as “Armenoid” or “Anatolian,” which seems to be both indigenous and persistent in the Anatolian Peninsula and in the triangle included between the Black Sea, the Mediterranean and the Caspian. Its characteristics are very individual—a “sugarloaf” skull, broad from side to side and sliced off at the back; prominent cheek-bones; a fleshy, hooked nose; and a rather clumsy, thick-set body. These features are distinguishable in the ancient Hittites of Eastern Anatolia, as they are portrayed in the native and Egyptian monuments of the 14th and 13th centuries B.C.; in the modern Tchatchadzé nomads of Lycia (the extreme South-West of the Peninsula); and in a considerable percentage of the living Armenian people, scattered all over the Near East.
[194]. Called “Ararat” in the Bible and “Alarodioi” by Herodotus.
[195]. “The City of Dhuspas (Tosp) in the land of Biaina (Van).” In the course of history the names have been transposed; Van is now the town, and Tosp the district.
[196]. Round the present town of Isbir, in the Tchorok Valley.
[197]. The chief evidence for the racial unity of all these primitive populations is the survival of the name of Khaldis, the national god of Urartu, throughout the Armenian plateau. On the banks of the Aras we have the district of Khaldiran, and the northern affluents of the river are fed by Lake Khaldir. Further west, the modern Vilayet of Trebizond was called the Province of Khaldia under the late Roman Empire, and there is still a Diocese of Khaldia maintained by the Orthodox Greek Church in the immediate hinterland of Trebizond.
[198]. The original focus from which the Indo-European languages spread having been situated apparently in what is now Austria-Hungary and the Ukraine.