James R. Russell

Iranians, Armenians, Prince Igor, and the Lightness of Pushkin

The Animal Style that characterizes Scythian art came into Armenia and Russia, where it is attested in bas-reliefs on churches; and the epic Song of Igors Campaign, a unique verbal reflection of it, inspired Pushkin and his descendants in their poetic visions.

On an Armenian Word List from the Cairo Geniza

This study deals with a short text on a small piece of paper, a conversational glossary, found in the Cairo Geniza. It is likely to be nearly a millennium old, and consists of a list of twenty Judaeo-Arabic words and phrases with their equivalents in Armenian written in Hebrew script. It suggests that members of the two communities met in a convivial setting, possibly a Barekendan (Mardi Gras) party where an official was parodied as a goat in effigy— a custom encountered in other Armenian celebrations of the holiday at Lvov in the 16th century; and Tiflis, in the 19th. The other words in the list reflect economic and cultural realia of the 11th-13th centuries.