- "The republication of classical and medieval sources with omissions, with the replacement of the term "Armenian state" by "Albanian state" and with other distortions of the original manuscripts was another way to play down the Armenian role in early and medieval Transcaucasia. ... The Azeri scholars did all of this by order of the Soviet and Party authorities of Azerbaijan, rather than through free will." Victor Schnirelmann. The Value of the Past: Myths, Identity and Politics in Transcaucasia. Senri Ethnological Studies. pp. 160, 196–97
- "Bournoutian’s scholarship has always been relevant. However, today it is even more essential as Armenia and Artsakh are facing monumental challenges due to the 2020 Artsakh War. One of these challenges deals with the intentional falsification of Artsakh’s history by Azeri scholars and their acolytes in the West. Bournoutian has been on the forefront of combatting this revisionist history, which has now infiltrated western academia through Azeri-funded centers and thanks to some Western scholars who seem infatuated by the Aliyev regime." -- Bedross Der Matossian, In Memoriam, Dr. George Bournoutian (1943–2021)
- "Scholars should be on guard when using Soviet and post-Soviet Azeri editions of Azeri, Persian, and even Russian and Western European sources printed in Baku. These have been edited to remove references to Armenians and have been distributed in large numbers in recent years. When utilizing such sources, the researchers should seek out pre-Soviet editions wherever possible." -- Robert Hewsen. Armenia: A Historical Atlas. University of Chicago Press, 2001. p. 291
- "It should be noted that such falsifications with regards to the regional history of Iranians and other groups, to the point of denial and falsification of their history (e.g. denial of Armenian, Greek and Assyrian genocides due to modern Turkic nationalism or claims that many Iranian figures and societies starting from the Medes, Scythians and Parthians were Turks), are still prevalent in countries that adhere to Pan-Turkist nationalism such as Turkey and the republic of Azerbaijan. These falsifications, which are backed by state and state backed non-governmental organizational bodies, range from elementary school all the way to the highest level of universities in these countries. Due to prevalent political situation in the world, where historical truths are sacrificed for political and financial reasons, falsification of history has even reached some authors who claim affiliation with Western academia as noted in the Part I of this book and exposed in other books such as Vyronis 1993. Another recent example was the desecration of Armenian monuments in Nakhjavan." -- Lornejad, Siavash; Doostzadeh, Ali (2012). Arakelova, Victoria; Asatrian, Garnik (eds.). On the modern politicization of the Persian poet Nezami Ganjavi (PDF). Caucasian Centre for Iranian Studies. p. 85 (note 277).
- "Azeri scholars, until some two decades ago, did not deny the historic Armenian presence in Mountainous Karabagh. In fact, the works of Mirza Jamal,'Mirza Adigozal Beg, Ahmad Beg, and Bakikhanov, mentioning an Armenian presence in the region, were printed in Baku. Everything tumed upside down in 1988, following the demands of the Armenians of Mountainous Karabagh to secede from Azerbaijan. Azeri politicians, journalists, and, as will be demonstrated below, even academics, in order to justify their government's anti-Armenian actions in Mountainous Karabagh, avowed that the region was never part of historic Armenia and that the Armenians of Mountainous Karabagh were newcomers who had gradually arrived there only after 1828." -- Bournoutian, George (2011). The 1823 Russian Survey of the Karabagh Province. A Primary Source on the Demography and Economy of Karabagh in the First Half of the 19th Century. Mazda Publishers. p. 427
- "A more recent revisionist view claims that in the nineteenth century Russia and Iran conspired to divide Azerbaijan between themselves. Considering that Iran fought two devastating wars with Russia (1803–1813 and 1824–1828), the idea of a Russo-Iranian conspiracy against Azerbaijan is totally absurd. However, this is exactly what the Azerbaijani nationalist poet Bakhtiar Vahabzadeh claims in his poem titled “Gulistan.” The poem refers to the 1813 Treaty of Golistan, according to which Iran lost part of its Transcaucasian possessions to Russia. This view is now widely accepted by Azerbaijani nationalists. The result has been that Azerbaijan’s post-Soviet national identity is not only Turko-centric but also very much anti-Iran. In many ways, it has been developed in opposition to Iran as “the other,” not only as a state but also as a culture and historical entity. Being Azerbaijani has come to mean denying any Iran connection." Eldar Mamedov (2017). The New Geopolitics of the South Caucasus: Prospects for Regional Cooperation and Conflict Resolution: Azerbaijan Twenty-Five Years after Independence: Accomplishments and Shortcomings. Lexington Books. p. 31
- "This certainly is the case with Zia Bunyatov, who has made an incomplete and defective Russian translation of Bakikhanov's text. Not only has he not translated any of the poems in the text, but he does not even mention that he has not done so, while he does not translate certain other prose parts of the text without indicating this and why. This is in particular disturbing because he suppresses, for example, the mention of territory inhabited by Armenians, thus not only falsifying history, but also not respecting Bakikhanov's dictum that a historian should write without prejudice, whether religious, ethnic, political or otherwise. [...] Guilistam-i Iram translated with commentary by Ziya M. Bunyatov (Baku. 1991), p.11, where the translator has deleted the words 'and Armenia' from the text, which shows, as indicated in the introduction, that his translation should be used with circumspection, because this is not the only example of omissions from Bakikhanov's text." -- pp. xvi and 5. The Heavenly Rose-Garden: A History of Shirvan & Daghestan. pp. xvi, 5. Willem M. Floor and Hasan Javadi
- "The young Azeri's seemingly innocuous, abstract archaeological paper was a deliberate political provocation: all the crosses on today's territory of Azerbaijan, including significantly Nagorno-Karabagh and Nakhichevan, were defined as Albanian, a people who in turn were seen as the direct ancestors of today's Azeris. // The rest, as they say, is history. The Armenian archaeologists were upset and threatened to walk out en bloc. Protests were filed, and even Russian scholars from Leningrad objected to this blatantly political appropriation, posing as scholarship. [...] // Thus, minimally, two points must be made. Patently false cultural origin myths are not always harmless." -- p. 154, Philip L. Kohl (1996). Nationalism, politics, and the practice of archaeology. Cambridge University Press
- "In the Republic of Azerbaijan, the long Soviet practice of historic falsification has left a legacy which has distorted both the views of many Azerbaijanis of Iran and the true nature of their cultural, ethnic and historic connections. The following are some examples of this process of falsification, which, incidentally, in the last few years, has been picked up and given new credence by a number of Western commentators. Several myths with significant policy implications shape the Azerbaijanis' views of their country, its origins, and its relations to Iran." -- p. 106, Shireen Hunter (1998). Shireen Hunter: Iran and Transcaucasia in the Post-Soviet Era. Routledge.
- "As noted, in order to construct an Azerbaijani national history and identity based on the territorial definition of a nation, as well as to reduce the influence of Islam and Iran, the Azeri nationalists, prompted by Moscow devised an "Azeri" alphabet, which replaced the Arabo-Persian script. In the 1930s a number of Soviet historians, including the prominent Russian Orientalist, Ilya Petrushevskii, were instructed by the Kremlin to accept the totally unsubstantiated notion that the territory of the former Iranian khanates (except Yerevan, which had become Soviet Armenia) was part of an Azerbaijani nation. Petrushevskii's two important studies dealing with the South Caucasus, therefore, use the term Azerbaijan and Azerbaijani in his works on the history of the region from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Other Russian academics went even further and claimed that an Azeri nation had existed from ancient times and had continued to the present. Since all the Russian surveys and almost all nineteenth-century Russian primary sources referred to the Muslims who resided in the South Caucasus as "Tatars" and not "Azerbaijanis", Soviet historians simply substituted Azerbaijani for Tatars. Azeri historians and writers, starting in 1937, followed suit and began to view the three-thousand-year history of the region as that of Azerbaijan. The pre-Iranian, Iranian, and Arab eras were expunged. Anyone who lived in the territory of Soviet Azerbaijan was classified as Azeri; hence the great Iranian poet Nezami, who had written only in Persian, became the national poet of Azerbaijan." -- p. xvi. Bournoutian, George (2016). The 1820 Russian Survey of the Khanate of Shirvan: A Primary Source on the Demography and Economy of an Iranian Province prior to its Annexation by Russia. Gibb Memorial Trust.
- "In fact, after Stalin’s failure to annex Iranian Azarbayjan in 1946, Soviet historians not only proclaimed that the khanates were never part of Iran and were independent entities, but began (and have continued to do so after 1991) to refer to Iranian Azarbayjan as south Azerbaijan, which had been separated from north Azerbaijan, see V. Leviatov, Ocherki iz istorii Azerbaidzhana v XVIII veke (Baku, 1948). Such absurd notions are completely negated by Article III of the Golestan Treaty and Article I of the treaties between Russia and the khans of Qarabagh, Shakki and Shirvan; see Appendix 4." -- Bournoutian, George (2021). "Georgia and the Khanates of South Caucasus in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century" in From the Kur to the Aras: A Military History of Russia’s Move into the South Caucasus and the First Russo-Iranian War, 1801-1813. Brill. p. 249 (note 4)"
- "In a book by Aziz Alakbarli, published by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Azerbaijan in 2007 – and no less edited by Academician Budag Badagov, Prof. Vali Aliyev and Dr. Jafar Giyassi of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences – the entire territory of the current Republic of Armenia is presented as Western Azerbaijan. The Monuments of Western Azerbaijan, reprinted several times in recent years and in different languages, opens with “The map [of ] the Ancient Turkish-Oghuz land – Western Azerbaijan (present day the Republic of Armenia)” [sic!]. According to this “study”, endorsed by the Azerbaijan Academy of Sciences, all monuments in Armenia are of “Turkic”, “Turkish” or “Arman-Turkish” origin, including the first-century Roman Temple of Garni, “referring to ancient Gargar Turks” [sic!], and the Cathedral of the Holy See of the Armenian Apostolic Church as a 7th-century “Arman-Turkish Christian temple Uchkilsa/Echmiadzin”.19 This kind of re-writing of “history” is based solely on sources produced by Azerbaijani authors, notably prominent academician and national figure Ziya Buniyatov, whom President Heydar Aliyev described as “the constructor of our identity and self-consciousness”.20 This constructed narrative is echoed in the political discourse of President Aliyev and is woven into state policies, diplomacy, public relations, identity construction and, critically, in the construction of extreme anti-Armenianism in Azerbaijan. -- pp. 586–587, Gippert, Jost and Dum-Tragut, Jasmine. Caucasian Albania: An International Handbook, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2023.
- "From the mid-2000s the notion of western Azerbaijan converged with revived interest in the khanates in a wide-ranging fetishisation of the Erivan (Irevan) khanate as a historically Azerbaijani entity. Covering some 7,500 square kilometres and most of present-day Armenia (if not exactly coextensive with it), the Erivan khanate has undergone the same kind of transformations as Caucasian Albania before it. Contemporary Azerbaijani historiography depicts the Erivan khanate as an ‘Azerbaijani state’, populated by autochthonous Azerbaijani Turks and sacralised as the burial ground of semi-mythological figures from the Turkic pantheon.73 ‘Azerbaijani Turk’ and ‘Muslim’ are used interchangeably in this literature, although contemporary demographic surveys differentiate the latter into Persians, Shia and Sunni Kurds and Turkic tribes.74 Emulating the nationalist scientism of Samvel Karapetyan, catalogues of lost Azerbaijani heritage depict a Turkic palimpsest beneath almost every monument and religious site in Armenia – whether Christian or Muslim." p. 117, Broers, Laurence (2019). Armenia and Azerbaijan: Anatomy of a Rivalry. Edinburgh University Press.
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