Armenian-Iranian Oikumene and the Turco-Mongolian Order: Cultural Synthesis and the Chronology of the Toponym Qarabagh

Abstrakt

The toponym Qarabagh is traditionally translated as “black garden”, yet this interpretation remains debatable and insufficient: the component qara in the Turkic-Mongolian tradition possesses a developed polysemy (“black”, “dark green,” “dense,” “large,” “abundant”), and the toponym itself has not until now been examined as part of a unified areal system. The goal of the article is to establish the etymology, semantics, and chronology of the toponym Qarabagh within the context of Turco-Mongolian imperial expansion of the 11th-14th centuries and to reconstruct its semantic evolution among nomadic and sedentary speakers. The toponym Qarabagh represents a structural calque of the Persian model bāgh-e siyāh, which emerged in the Oghuz-Turkic linguistic environment no later than the 11th century in the zone of Turkic-Persian cultural synthesis in Khorasan and Afghanistan; the Mongol expansion of the 13th-14th centuries ensured its transcontinental dissemination and administrative consolidation in the Caucasus. Qarabagh is the result of prolonged interaction among several cultural-historical layers: the ancient Iranian agricultural civilization, the Armenian garden-agricultural substrate, the Kurdish intermediary stratum, and the Turkic-Mongolian nomadic world. The toponymy of the region constitutes a classic case of medieval polyonymy: the Armenian Baghkʿ, the Persian Bāgh-e Siyāh, and the Turkic-Persian Qarabagh represent three territorially separated but semantically parallel embodiments of a single concept – “a place of gardens / dark green viticultural landscape.”