Bert Vaux (University of Cambridge)

The name Karabakh (Armenian Gharabagh, Ղարաբաղ; Azerbaijani Qarabağ; Persian Qarābāgh; Russian Karabakh) presents a very different etymological problem from that of its Armenian counterpart Arts‘akh. Whereas the latter is ancient and as yet unresolved, Gharabagh is a comparatively recent, medieval formation whose components are transparent; the scholarly debate concerns not what the name is made of, but what it was intended to mean.

Attestation and extent

The name first emerges to modern eyes in the Mongol period. The earliest datable attestation is numismatic: in 1240–1242 the Armenian prince Hasan-Jalal of Khachʻen struck coins of Mongol type at a mint named Qarābāgh (Akopyan 2015). It appears in Persian geographical literature by about 1340, in the Nuzhat al-qulūb of Hamdallah Mustawfi, and in European travel accounts of the early fifteenth century, as Carabaqui in Ruy González de Clavijo and Karawag in Johann Schiltberger. The first Armenian author to use it is the fifteenth-century historian Tʻovma Metsopʻetsʻi (Ulubabyan 1981). Originally the name designated the lowland plain between the Kura and the Araxes, used as winter pasture by Turkic nomads; only gradually, and above all after the Karabakh Khanate moved its seat to Shushi in the eighteenth century, did it come to embrace the Armenian highlands formerly known as Khachʻen and Arts‘akh.

Etymology

The standard analysis, adopted in the Encyclopaedia of Islam (Bosworth 1978), divides the name into Turkic qara ‘black’ and Persian bāgh ‘garden’ (from Middle Persian bāg, generally connected with Old Iranian *bāga- ‘share, allotted portion’). Such Turko-Persian hybrids are common in the toponymy of the region, and the Armenian form, with gh- for Turkic q-, reflects the usual treatment of Turkic uvulars in Armenian loans. The literal meaning ‘black garden’ is usually explained with reference to dense, dark vegetation or fertile dark soil.

Several alternative interpretations have been advanced. Vladimir Minorsky (1943) suggested a link with a Turkic tribal name. The historian Ahmad Kasravi and, more recently, the numismatist Alexander Akopyan take qara in the secondary sense ‘great, abundant’ that it has in some Turkic place names, yielding ‘great garden’ or ‘rich in gardens’, while Abdolali Karang derived it instead from an Old Azari (Iranian) word kala ‘large’. The historian Bagrat Ulubabyan combined this reading with the name of the Armenian canton of Baghkʻ in Siwnikʻ, interpreting the whole as ‘Greater Baghkʻ’ (Hewsen 2001).

Assessment

Measured against the criteria that Hrach Martirosyan (2010; 2022) has formulated for toponymic etymology, the case of Gharabagh is straightforward: the name is securely attested from the thirteenth century, its two components are well-established appellatives, and its structure is paralleled elsewhere in the Turko-Persian world, for example in the district of Qarabagh in Ghazni province, Afghanistan. The existence of such distant homonyms tells against Ulubabyan’s derivation from a local Armenian canton name, and the tribal hypothesis lacks independent support. What cannot be determined on linguistic grounds alone is which sense of qara the name-givers intended, ‘black’ or ‘great, abundant’; both readings have their advocates. In either case, the name reflects the perspective of the Turkic- and Persian-speaking newcomers who dominated the lowlands from the Mongol period onward, while the region’s Armenian inhabitants long continued to call their homeland Arts‘akh and Khachʻen.

Bibliography

Sources

Clavijo, R. G. de, Embassy to Tamerlane, 1403–1406, trans. G. Le Strange, London: Routledge 1928.

Mustawfi, H., The Geographical Part of the Nuzhat-al-Qulūb, trans. G. Le Strange (E. J. W. Gibb Memorial 23.2), Leiden: Brill – London: Luzac 1919.

Schiltberger, J., The Bondage and Travels of Johann Schiltberger, trans. J. B. Telfer, London: Hakluyt Society 1879.

Research literature

Akopyan, A. V., “On the Earliest Coins of Khachen (Qarabāgh)”, Journal of the Oriental Numismatic Society 222 (2015), p. 6-11.

Bosworth, C. E., “Ḳarā Bāgh”, in E. van Donzel – B. Lewis – Ch. Pellat – C. E. Bosworth (eds.), The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., vol. 4, Leiden: Brill 1978, p. 573.

Hewsen, R. H., Armenia: A Historical Atlas, Chicago – London: University of Chicago Press 2001.

Karang, A., Tāti va Harzani: do lahje az zabān-e bāstān-e Āzarbāyjān, Tabriz: E. Vaezpour 1954.

Martirosyan, H., Etymological Dictionary of the Armenian Inherited Lexicon (Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 8), Leiden – Boston: Brill 2010.

Martirosyan, H., “Place Names in Artsakh/Gharabagh, Syunik, and Surroundings”, unpublished manuscript, Leiden 2022.

Minorsky, V. (trans.), Tadhkirat al-Mulūk: A Manual of Ṣafavid Administration (E. J. W. Gibb Memorial, n.s. 16), London: Luzac 1943.

Ulubabyan, B., “Ղարաբար” [Gharabagh], in Haykakan sovetakan hanragitaran, vol. 7, Erevan: Main Editorial Office of the Armenian Encyclopedia 1981, p. 26.