The Armenian Population is one of the most genetically continuous populations in the world, today. Studies have shown that due to their geographic, religious, and societal isolation, they have bred almost entirely within their own population for over 4,000years. The Armenians are also one of the oldest surviving populations in existence.
Armenian chroniclers can be divided into two groups. One group, taking the Bible as their source, claim that the Armenians descended from Haik, one of He grandsons of Japheth, and that they are the native people of the territory called Armenia. Haik, according to Armenian chroniclers, was the grandson of the Prophet Noah's grandson.
While the second group according to the Thracian-Phrygian Theory historians claims that the Armenian people descended from a Thracian-Phrygian group, that originated in the Balkan Peninsula and by the pressure of Illyrians migrated to eastern Anatolia in the sixth century B.C. This theory is based on the fact that the name Armenian was mentioned for the first time in the Behistan inscription of the Mede (Persian) Emperor Darius from the year 521 B.C.,"I defeated the Armenians."
In ancient times Strabo, Herodotus, and others described Armenian settlers and the Armenian cavalry’s valor in Greece’s service. Successive generations of ethnic Armenians served in courts and as diplomatic envoys of Persian shahs. Others developed commerce.
Elsewhere ethnic Armenians facilitated the Mughal rulers’ finances and administered commerce up to, and in some cases after, the establishment of the English rule in India. In the 9th and 10th centuries, as a result of Byzantine politics, some Armenian nobles with their families and retainers, abandoning historical Armenia’s eastern borders, moved west.
Armenian migration to the United States began centuries ago, shortly after the first British colonists arrived in North America. Armenian migrants at the start of the 17th century arrived in small numbers, which did not increase much throughout most of the 18th and 19th centuries.
History of Armenian people
