Armenoid

The Armenoid type is a stable hybrid between two principal elements, the Alpine race and the Irano-Afghan division of the Mediterranean stock, mixed at the ratio of 2 of the latter to 1 of the former. The combination has produced a greater laterality than either parent stock, an excess of brachycephaly, and an excess of facial length and nasality. In northern and eastern Armenia, a strong Nordic infusion has altered the blend in a linear direction, and has infused a minority with partial blondism; in southern and western Armenia, a parallel infusion of Mediterranean factors, comparable to those found in Syria and Arabia, has reduced the stature and other linear dimensions, while increasing the brunet character of the pigmentation.

Thus the Armenoid race is a product of the same principle of hybridization which has produced Dinarics in Europe,151 the chief difference being that among the Armenians the Mediterranean factor involved is Irano-Afghan, while in countries farther east it is one of several varieties more familiar to Europeans. In tracing relationships between Dinarics and Armenoids, as between groups of Dinarics, it is futile to look for historic associations, since the relationship is parallel rather than derivative. Racial analysis has indicated something that archaeology has only begun to reveal; that Anatolia, the Syrian highlands, and the Armenian plateau are not, in all likelihood, basic Mediterranean racial territory, but the former homelands of a population similar to that living in Europe during late glacial times. The Alpine race, here as in central Europe, from France to Albania, has reëmerged, and in so doing has blended with Mediterranean forms in a characteristic way. Another conclusion which one may make from this study is that Anatolia was never, until the time of the Ottoman Empire, an important highroad of racial movements; its main role has been that of a refuge area, and the same is true of the Syrian mountains and those of Armenia.

A separate group of brachycephalic Near Eastern people living until recently in the neighborhood of the eastern Armenians is that of the Aissores, or Assyrians, Christians who still speak the old Syric language, now used in Syria in a ritual sense only, but once widespread also in Mesopotamia. These Assyrians, Christians in Mesopotamia since their conversion in 70 AD., were, at the time of the Arab conquest of their country, granted a firman issued by the Prophet himself permitting them to practice their religion without hindrance. Under this sanction they flourished greatly, sent missionaries to China, and founded a colony, which still exists, in India.152 At the time of the Mongol invasions, between 1230 and 1400 A.D., their country was laid waste, and those who survived the calamity fled northward into Turkey, settling in the mountain district of Hakkiari, in Kurdish country, south of Lake Van and west of Lake Urmia. In 1914, 80,000 of them were still established there, while another 35,000 lived in Iran, near Lake Urmia, and 10,000 more had returned to the lowlands of Iraq, near Mosul. During the World War and in the two decades since, the Assyrians have suffered further political disasters which have left them homeless and have greatly reduced their numbers.

These Assyrians, whose ancestors, presumably plainsmen from Iraq, may have been no different in a physical sense from the other inhabitants of that valley, are now, after some six hundred years of living in the mountains, more brachycephalic than the Armenians.153 Their mean stature is about 167 cm., their cephalic index mean about 87, with series by different authors varying from 85 to 90. They are almost purely brunet, and characteristically aquiline in nasal profile. Their total resemblance to Armenians, however, is not close; the faces of the Assyrians are both shorter and narrower than those of the Armenians, and their noses are likewise smaller. It is possible that mixture with Armenians produced the initial stimulus toward hyperbrachycephaly, but whatever its immediate origin, the facial dimensions show that the basic Mediterranean type involved is western, and not Irano-Afghan.

Even more of a refuge area than Asia Minor, the Caucasus mountain range and the valleys to either side provide shelter to an extremely varied conglomeration of peoples. Besides the Armenians, the Aissores, the Kurds, the Tats, who are Iranians living near Baku, and the Azerbaijani Turks, and some Tatars and Mongols, the Caucasus contains the Caucasians proper, who are the speakers of Caucasic languages, and the Ossetes, whose language is Iranian and for whom descent is claimed from the Alans, the last ethnic survivors of the Sarmatians recorded in history.154

The Caucasic speakers are divided into four main branches, each of which has many subdivisions; these branches are the Lesghians, the Chechens, the Cherkesses or Circassians, and the Georgians. Map 16 will show the distribution of these peoples. The various subdivisions of these peoples, living in their separate valleys, follow different forms of Christianity and of Islam, while the presence of Jewish villages complicates the religious pattern. The Georgians, however, are mostly Christian, the Cherkesses mostly Moslems; with the Russian conquest of the northern Slopes of the Caucasus, many of the latter emigrated to Ottoman Turkish territory, including Syria and the Balkans. Most of the Lesghians are also Moslems, while the Chechen are for the most part Christians, as is the majority of the Indo-European-speaking Ossetes. The Tats are Moslems.

Source: The Races of Europe by Carleton Stevens Coon Near Eastern brachycephals; Syria, Armenia, and the Caucasus - Chapter XII, section 18