I too would vote for Armenia (mostly based on the lack of recent 6 years-long wars in this area countries, the Ark tidbit and the people being moved around). It should be quite easy to check how long the war with Azerbaidjan lasted. That would be a give-away if it was 6 years (though it seems to me there’s only a cease-fire at the moment. Am I wrong?).
The war could be said to have started in February of 1988 and lasted until the ceasefire in 1994 making it six years but no declared victory.
I’m still confused about the Ark clue. Where exactly in Armenia does Ptolemy contend the Ark lies if it isn’t on Mount Ararat which is in Turkey?
I swear, I guessed Armenia before reading anything but the OP. Nobody ever remembers the Armenians! (Although I don’t have the detail of historical knowledge of some of the other posters.) And Gest, the more nationalistic Armenians still lay claim to Mt. Ararat as part of “greater Armenia.” (Not to mention Nagorno-Karabakh, etc.)
I did a hilarious conspiaracy theory term paper in grad school on Russian influence in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. At one point, the Armenians, not known recently as a great military power, started kicking some Azerbaijani butt. I actually did a phone interview with a guy at the Armenian Embassy in D.C. (not until I proved who I was by mailing him a latter from my school, although what that was supposed to prove, I had no idea). He told me that it was a “misconcpetion” that Armenia was backing the Karabakh Armenians in the war in any way except by providing moral support. No military, technical, or economic asistance at all, no sirree. My prof and I got a good laugh out of that one.
I stumbled across this reference Ptolemy and the ark. The reference seems to come from a 1548 book Ptolemy’s Geographia
Not exactly, though I’m no expert on Tigranes. I know his ally and father-in-law Mithridates VI Eupator Dionysus of Pontus was somewhat Hellenized ( though he was king of a then ‘Asiatic’ region of Anatolia ) and immersed himself in Greek culture, surrounded himself with Greek advisors and was very popular with the ‘Asiatic Greeks’ of western Anatolia. Somewhat similarly with Tigranes, it seems more that in concert with his new conquests he built a new capital and set himself as self-consciously Hellenic monarch in the vein of the Seleucids he had vanquished. His population transfers ( at least any mention that I have run across ) seems to have referred to the new capital, which was peopled from transfers of conquered Greeks from the former Seleucid demesnes, rather than the populace of Armenia proper ( frankly I doubt he could have had the surplus Greek population to “replace” the Armenians in any large part ).
It is a little confusing, but Mt. Ararat is considered the symbol of Armenia and is in Turkish Armenia ( a relict of the general region and population of Armenia having been split between the Ottomans and Russians ). Since the question asked for an area rather than a country and Armenians fit the diaspora model and the six-year war requirement ( in the case of the independent republic of Armenia ), it is really the only possible answer.
- Tamerlane