Azarbaijan: the Real, the Fake and the Absurd

Azarbaijan: the Real, the Fake and the Absurd

The Geography of Azarbaijan (Atrpatakan)

The appellation Lesser Media or Media Minor was given to the northwest part of Media after it was divided into two regions. The rest of the empire was called Greater Media. The Lesser Media (later Atrpatakan) is usually known to have stretched from the Arax River in the north to Mount Alvand in the south. To the west, it reached the Zagross mountain range and included Lake Urmia in the east. Hegmataneh (Hamadan) was the point that divided the Lesser and Greater Media. This is the approximate situation of present day real Azarbaijan (Atrpatakan).

It should be noted that a part of Lesser Media, the region north east of Lake Urmia including the present cities of Maku, Khoy and Marand, was called Sangibutu by the Assyrians and was a part of the Armenian kingdom of Van (Biaina/Urartu) until the eighth century BC, a fact confirmed by Diakonov as well.

After the overthrow of the Median Empire by Cyrus the Great and the rise of the Achaemenid Empire, Cyrus did not obliterate the name of Media and called himself king of the Medes. This is an important point in the light of "Azeri" fantasy concoctions warping the Medes into indigenous Turco-Sumerians (!) who the Iranian "invaders" conquered and divided the "great Azerbaijan" into two northern and southern entities and more of this sort of hallucination.

In an 1890s edition of the Russian Encyclopedia printed in St. Petersburg and Leipzig under the Caucasus Albania (Aghvank, Aran) entry we read: "Albania is an ancient land in southeast Caucasus between the Black Sea and the Caspian, north of Armenia with the River Kur as its border". The Turkic inhabitants of the Aghvank of the day are referred to as Tatars throughout the relevant passages. Under the Azarbaijan heading the book states: "Azarbaijan or Adhrbijan (land of fire (an erroneous definition H.), in Pahlavi Aturpatekan, in Armenian Atrpatakan) is the rich and industrial northwestern province of Iran. Azarbaijan is limited in the south to the Kurdistan of Iran .in the west to Kurdistan and Armenia of Turkey, to the north to Armenia of Russia and the south of the Caucasus with the Arax River as the dividing line. The area of Azarbaijan is 104,840 square km. .In the seventeenth century Azarbaijan suffered greatly from the Ottomans".

While there is no word about any "Azerbaijan" north of the Arax River in the former, the Soviet edition of the same encyclopedia printed in Moscow in 1960 mentions Soviet "Azerbaijan" with an area of 86,600 square km and the Azarbaijan (Atrpatakan) of Iran with an area of more than 100,000 square km. As it can be seen, the newly faked "Azerbaijan" couldn't have been the divided half of a fictitious "unified Azerbaijan" since other than the fact that such land north of the Arax was not cited in the older edition, the additional 86,600 square km can in no way be explained other than that this new "Azerbaijan" was a total forgery.

The People of Azarbaijan (Atrpatakan)

Like with any other nation, there is no definite point in history where one could refer to as the absolute date of the formation of the Iranian nation. Some would say the history of Iranian civilization goes back four or five thousand years BC. Others cite a migration of Aryan (Iranian) tribes into the Iranian plateau in the first millennium BC as the birth of the Iranian nation.

In the second half of the eighth century BC the Iranian element dominated most of the western parts of Iran. The Assyrian king Salmanasar III's (Shalmaneser III) inscriptions mention Iranians who lived along the path of the Assyrian invasions. They knew the Parsuans (Persians) and the Madai (Medes) in that period. In the wars between Salmanasar III and the Armenian king Argishti in the eighth century BC, the name Parrusa (Parsua) appears in relation with the region that would be called Lesser Media (later Atrpatakan). Parsua and Parsuvans come up for the first time in 844 BC, in the inscriptions of Tiglathpileser III and his wars with the Iranians.

The Language of Azarbaijan (Atrpatakan)

Azari is a term used by some Islamic historians to describe the language of the people of the real Azarbaijan (Atrpatakan), northwest of Iran and always south of the Arax River. It was a language of the Persian family of languages called Pahlavi. The dialect spoken in Atrpatakan was called Pahlavi Azari to differentiate it from other Pahlavi dialects. Considering the literary work that has been produced in Azarbaijan (the real), one can see that this language was in use well into the times of the Iranian Safavid Empire 1502-1736.

For instance, the poems of seventh and eighth century Hijri Azarbaijani (the real) poet Hamam Tabrizi, eighth and ninth century Hijri poet Ezzeddin Adel ibn Yussof Tabrizi, etc., don't show a single trace of Turkish. They are written in Pahlavi Azari, the Persian language of the people of Azarbaijan (Atrpatakan). Later, as a result of the tyrannical domination of invading hordes of Mongolo-Tatar barbarians, the people of Atrpatakan gradually lost their indigenous language and became speakers of Turkish. The word Azari has been mistakenly or misleadingly attributed to the Turkish dialect of these people by some, but never to the people themselves. The people of real Azarbaijan were always called people of Atrpatakan, Aturpayegan, Atropatena, Azarbayegan, Azarbaijan, etc.

Ya'qubi calls the language of the people of Azarbaijan (Atrpatakan) Pahlavi Azari and considers the people of that region of Iranian origin.

Massoudi considers Dari and Azari from the same origin and calls them languages of the Farsi (Persian) group.

Ibn Hawqal uses the term Azari to define the dialect of the people of Azarbaijan (Atrpatakan) to distinguish it from other dialects of Persian.

Muqaddasi describes Azari as a language close to Farsi: "It's a difficult language and its vocabulary is similar to that of Khorasan (or Khorassan northeast of Iran H.)"

Yaqut Hamawi mentions the language of the people of Azarbaijan (Atrpatakan): "they speak a language which is called Azari and nobody understands it besides themselves", i.e. Turks don't understand a word of Azari, because it's a dialect of Pahlavi exclusive to the people of Azarbaijan the real.

Hamdollah Mostowfi Qazvini says "the people of Maragha" (in real Azarbaijan H.) "speak a modified dialect of Pahlavi".

Joseph Markwart defines "the language of Atropatena [as] the real Pahlavi language. The written Pahlavi is the same as that of Atropatena and is derived from Parthian Pahlavi".

Igrar Aliev (Aliyev) the rare "Azeri" historian with some integrity also admits that "what we consider the language of Median Aturpatekan is without a doubt an Iranian language".

There's not a single historical document that would raise the slightest doubt that the language called Azari had an iota of resemblance or relation to Turkish. The artificial counterfeiting of fictitious "Azerbaijan" north of the Arax River on historic Armenian territory in 1918 forced the pan-Turkist theoreticians to fabricate nonsensical fables to "prove" that the term Azari, referred to the language of the people of real Azarbaijan south of the Arax, was in fact a dialect of Turkish. However, reading the literary works written in that language leads to the conclusion that this is a preposterous claim and couldn't be further from the truth. It's astonishing how Turks affirm their lies without presenting a single proof and totally disregard the evidence that pulverizes their theories.

Some harmless mistakes such as the translation from Arabic into Persian of a book, in times of Nasseruddin Shah Qajar 1848-1896, have also come to the help of Turkish history forgers. The translators of the book Nameh e Daneshvaran have translated the Arabic word "al-Azaria" into "language of the Turks". Obviously, there is no mention of "Turk" in the term al-Azaria, it's just because in the times of Nasseruddin Shah in the 19th century, the people of real Azarbaijan had already become speakers of Turkish, unaware of the already lost Iranian language Azari Pahlavi, the translators have assumed that the term al-Azaria anachronistically referred to the language of the Turks.

The great Iranian scholar Ahmad Kassravi, himself a Turkish speaking real Azarbaijani, has this to say in his book Azari, the Ancient Language of Azarbaijan: "It's one of the wonders that in the book Nameh e Daneshvaran, which some have been involved with in the times of Nasseruddin Shah, they have defined al-Azaria as the language of the Turks in the translation of this story (of Abul Ala al-Ma'ari and his student Abu Zachariah Khatib Tabrizi) and this shows that they weren't aware of the existence of any other language for the people of Azarbaijan throughout history. This is an error on their part that they have resorted only to their own knowledge and without explaining the reasons have written "language of Turks" instead of "Azari" which has given the pretext to those who claim that Azarbaijan has been the homeland of the Turks since the beginning".