Armenia’s Warrior Queen
During the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, the Republic of Armenia established its first all-women military detachment. This was the latest in a series of developments that won women the right to serve in the Armenian armed forces since military academies first opened their doors to them in 2013. The unit was named the Erato Detachment, after a first-century Armenian queen. The inclusion of historical women in modern Armenian discourse is a relatively new and rare phenomenon and it is in large part the product of work within the field of Armenian studies over the past few years. The absence of historical female figures can ultimately be traced to the ways in which they were represented in the earliest Armenian historical narratives, which continue to play an important role in the collective Armenian memory.
P‘aranjem, the fourth-century warrior queen, is a complex and enigmatic figure in early Armenian history. A case study of the way in which her story has been recorded provides a perfect example of how some texts marginalise women from the past. While there is a brilliant range of early medieval Armenian literature, it is conditioned by traditional social constraints. The sources are, for example, primarily interested in the nobility (the naxarars), meaning our view of early Armenia is seen through a largely male and elite gaze. But some texts, such as Buzandaran Patmut‘iwnk‘, an anonymous history of the Kingdom of Armenia from AD 330 until its decline and partition in 387, contain the stories of figures such as P‘aranjem.
