The name
Armenia is an
exonym, the
Armenian language name for the country being Hayk‘ (see
Haik for a discussion of that name). Its first unambiguous application as the ethnonym of the
Armenians is in a late 6th century BC
Old Persian inscription, as Armina, and a few decades later,
Herodotus, in his review of the troops opposing the Greeks, wrote that “the Armenians were armed like the
Phrygians, being Phrygian settlers" . Some more decades later,
Xenophon, a Greek general waging war against the Persians, describes many aspects of Armenian village life and hospitality. He relates that the people spoke a language that to his ear sounded like the language of the
Persians.. There are, however, surprisingly early (Bronze Age) attestations of what appears to be the same name as a geographical term in both Mesopotamian and Egyptian sources. The earliest is from an inscription which mentions Armânum (also read Armani) together with Ibla (
Ebla) as territories conquered by
Naram-Sin (23rd century BC) identified with an Akkadian colony in the
Diarbekr region
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