Armenian And Iranian Studies.

• Author: Greppin, John A.C.
• Position: Book review

Armenian and Iranian Studies. By JAMES R. RUSSELL. Harvard Armenian Texts and Studies, vol. 9. Belmont, Mass.: ARMENIAN HERITAGE PRESS, 2004. Pp. xxix + 1462, illus. $75. [Distributed by Harvard Univ. Press]

James R. Russell is surely one of the most productive of Armenologists today. This collection of ninety-one articles, published in the last thirty-plus years, and not including any of his reviews nor considering his numerous books, is a supreme testimony to his scholarship and industry. And though the title of this work is Armenian and Iranian Studies, the noun order should perhaps be reversed, for much of his production has primary reference to Iranian, and little of his Armenian work is done without heavy recourse to the Persian world. Russell is a comparativist, and this enriches his work greatly, placing the early small Armenian culture in the greater Iranian world that surrounded it. Darius, after three great battles mentioned in his inscriptions, first brought the Armenians to heel (ca. 525 B.C.). So great was the influence of the following Arsacid dynasty that we have about as many Parthian words and stems in the Armenian language as we have those of unmediated Indo-European origin (Armenian was considered a curious Iranian dialect until 1876). The following Sasanian hostility to the growth of Christianity was only temporary and subsided by the beginning of the fifth century, when Armenia, rejecting Zoroastrianism, Manicheanism, and Gnosticism, became Christian through the influence of Gregory, the foremost saint of the Armenian Christian pantheon.

Russell's principal interests seem to be in mythology, fable, mysticism, spiritualism, and religious eccentricity. He derives his material from Armenian spiritual documents, the Babylonian Talmud, the Kabbala, the Armenian commentaries on the Old and New Testaments, Zoroastrian texts, and other such documents. He will quote, for instance, the Talmudic Tractate Hagigah when discussing St. Grigor Narekatsi's Book of Lamentation. There he examines the Armenian phrase loycn macuac, glossed by him as "liquid congelation," the heavenly seas that "separate space from Heaven." Here we have a very learned discussion of a medieval Christian topic, but at times it is unclear whether Russell is writing a scholarly article, or giving a religious lesson to a gathering of mystics. Elsewhere his epexegetical skills follow in a more conventional path. In "The Problematic Snake Children of Armenia" (pp...