Nicholas Wade
Movses
Khorenatsi, a historian in the fifth century, wrote that his native
Armenia had been established in 2492 B.C., a date usually regarded as
legendary though he claimed to have traveled to Babylon and consulted
ancient records. (*) But either he made a lucky guess or he really did gain
access to useful data, because a new genomic analysis suggests that his
date is entirely plausible.
Geneticists
have scanned the genomes of 173 Armenians from Armenia and Lebanon and
compared them with those of 78 other populations from around the world.
They found that the Armenians are a mix of ancient populations whose
descendants now live in Sardinia, Central Asia and several other
regions. This formative mixture occurred from 3000 to 2000 B.C., the
geneticists calculated, coincident with Movses Khorenatsi’s date for the
founding of Armenia.
