Some Azerbaijani Tall Tales

Vartan Matiossian

I recently came across an asinine piece crafted by some Azerbaijani "historian" and lodged at their "Presidential Library" meant to show the huge antiquity of Baku (1), which was an obscure Russian outpost in the nineteenth century until oil extraction started and Armenians, who were among the pioneering oilmen, became one of the main driving forces behind the building and embellishment the city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. However, this is something those "historians" always fail to remember.

A few samples are worth of mention just for their "enlightening" value:

a) "The Egyptian Pharaoh Minesan first mentioned Baku in the Book of Dead in 3,500 BC."

No Pharaoh called "Minesan" has ever existed. If the writer is talking about Menes, the founder of the First Dynasty, he died in 3125 BC. Moreover, the Book of Dead is dated at the time of the New Kingdom (1550 BC). So much for the command of dates.
It is also fitting that the Book of Dead mentions Bakhau as a "mountain of glass." I have always thought that Baku is a town, not a mountain. A famous British Egyptologist, Flinders Petrie (1853-1942), meandered away of his field of expertise and wrote down the equivalence Bakhau = Baku in an article of 1924 where he also shared the view by a radio engineer, Reginald Fessenden, that the fabled continent of Atlantis was located in the Black Sea and had been destroyed during the Flood that brough us Noah's Ark (2).

b) "Stone carvings dating back to 12,000 years ago (...)" "the ancient age of Baku." 

 
We are not aware that prehistorical carvings from 10,000 B.C. may indicate the existence and much less be predecessors of a town. Perhaps they even suppose that it was already filled with Azerbaijanis. Maybe the caves of Lascaux in 17,000 B.C. are proof in plain sight that the town of Lascaux ever existed with a French population in the prehistory!

c) "(...) [A] stone carving by August Guy Octavio who reflected the stationing of a military camp under the rule of the Roman emperors Pompey and Lucius near Baku (40 km to the south) for the purposes of seizing the southern Caucasus in the 1st century BC."

 
Have you ever heard of someone called "Guy" in Roman history? (3) By the way, "August Guy Octavio" sounds like Gaius (Julius Caesar) Augustus, aka Octavianus, that is Augustus, the first Roman emperor. Octavianus was born on 63 BC, the same year that Roman "emperor" Pompey's campaign in Asia was winding down with the suicide of the defeated Mithridates VI Eupator, the last king of Pontus, in the Crimea. So he could hardly be the "author" of that stone carving, if such is what that confused Azerbaijani mind is implying.
In the same breath, have you ever heard of Roman "emperors" Pompey and Lucius in the first century BC? History only knows about Roman *generals* (Lucius Licinius) Lucullus and Pompey (Gneus Pompeius Magnus).
 

If there was a Roman military camp 40 kilometers to the south of Baku, what did it have to do with Baku itself?

We are aware of a Roman inscription in the late 1st century AD in the current territory of Azerbaijan from the time of Emperor Domitian (81-96), probably because Romans established a military presence there for a short while. But if they cannot distinguish an emperor from a general and Domitian from Pompey and Lucullus, then there is nothing left to say.

Except that the poisoning of history needs to be denounced for what it is.

NOTES

(1) https://files.preslib.az/projects/remz/pdf_en/atr_paytaxt.pdf. Needless to say, the same "facts," along with others similar "pearls" of knowledge, have been mindlessly repeated by all sorts of Azerbaijani websites.

(2) Flinders Petrie, "The Caucasian Atlantis and Eygpt," Ancient Egypt, September 1924, see https://www.jasoncolavito.com/flinders-petrie-on-atlantis.html.

(3) The only "August Octavio" I have found through the Internet is the last great-grandchild of Evelyn Luna and a mortal Julian Luna, the Kindred Prince of San Francisco, and the grandfather of Sasha... in the game World of Darkness.