User:Youngkyf/sandbox

Change of names
Geographical names given after Turkic dominance and Turkification             of the peoples of the region were changed en masse back to their original Armenian, Caucasian Albanian, and mostly-Iranian-sourced names, which were shared in use by the original inhabitants of the area because it was entirely consolidated under the Median and then Achaemenid Iranian Empires, but Iranian names were most common. Additionally, all being Indo-European languages, many are also cognates. These names existed long before Turkic migration,  specifically that of the Oghuz  (whose original homeland was the Jeti-su area,  south of Lake Balkhash in Kazakhstan near the border with China -very near to the area where Turkic Uyghurs are experiencing genocide today- and who did not migrate westward from out of that area until after the historical conflict of the 8th Century CE with the Karluk allies of the Uyghurs after the conquest of the Transoxiana region by the Chinese Tang Dynasty, when the Karluk Turks later rose in rebellion in 745 and became allies to the Uygur and Basmyl Turkic tribes and was recorded by Chinese historians. After which, the first Oghuz Yabgu State was created,        still thousands of kilometers away from modern Azerbaijan in 750 CE between the Caspian and Aral seas on the territories of modern Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan), which did not occur south, west, or southwest of the Caspian Sea until the 10th Century,          hundreds of years after the establishment and habitation of the peoples and kingdoms of the territory of Transcaucasia, a portion of which that now makes up the country of Azerbaijan, when they entered into the Kingdom of Caucasian Albania which was founded 1,100 years earlier than the appearance of Oghuz Turkic people in the 2nd Century BCE; into the the Kingdom of Armenia   which was founded 1,431 years earlier than the appearance of Oghuz Turkic people in the year 321 BCE -as an autonomous vassal satrapy/kingdom first to the Iranian Median Empire  and then the Achaemenid Empire of Iran; and into Arran,   as the area was called at the time when Oghuz Turks first appeared, hundreds of years after Christianization of the Caucasus, during the Islamic Sajid Dynasty of Iran,   all of which have been occupied by Indo Europeans and Iranian tribes since prehistoric times, in this case thousands of years before the appearance of Oghuz Turkic people, when the region was governed by intermarried and related ruling noble families that all spoke Indo European languages, whereas Turkic languages are either an independent language family or belong to the Altaic Language Family along with Korean, Mongolian, and Japonic languages. In the 9th century, the Oghuz from the Aral steppes drove Pechenegs from the Emba and Ural River region toward the west. In the 10th century, they inhabited the steppe of the rivers Sari-su, Turgai, and Emba to the north of Lake Balkhash inside modern Kazakhstan. A clan of this nation, the Seljuks, embraced Islam and in the 11th century entered Persia and founded the Great Seljuk Empire.

Many place names in the present-day Republic of Azerbaijan and Iranian Azerbaijan have Persian roots. Tabriz is borrowed from Old Tati/Old Azeri, which is an extinct Iranian Language, the name derives from tap-riz 'flowing hot', from the many thermal springs in the area. Other sources claim that in 246 BCE, to avenge his brother's death, king Tiridates II of Armenia repelled Ardashir I of the Sassanid Empire and changed the name of the city from Iranian Shahistan to Tau-vris, derived from "ta-vrezh" "this revenge" in Grabar. In AD 297, 6 hundred years before Turkic Migration, it became the capital of Tiridates III, King of Arsacid Armenia. The Cambridge History of Iran  points to a connection between the "ancient [pre-Iranian] stronghold of Tarui-Tarmakisa" (or Tarwi-Tarwakisa)   , which existed in the 8th century BC,  and of Caucasian Albanian origin directly.

The first mention of Baku was in 885, just before the Turkic migrations of the 10th and 11th centuries. The name is derived from Persian بادکوبه (Bâd-kube, meaning "wind-pounded city", a compound of bād, "wind", and kube, which is rooted in the verb کوبیدن kubidan, "to pound", thus referring to a place where wind would be strong and pounding, as is the case of Baku, which is known to experience fierce winter snow storms and harsh winds). This popular name (Badkubə in modern Azerbaijani script) gained currency as a nickname for the city by the 19th century (e.g., it is used in Akinchi, volume 1, issue 1, p. 1), and is also reflected in the city's modern nickname as the "City of Winds" (Küləklər şəhəri). Another folk etymology explains the name as deriving from Baghkuy, meaning "God's town". Baga (now بغ bagh) and kuy are the Old Persian words for "god" and "town" respectively; the name Baghkuy may be compared with Baghdād ("God-given") in which dād is the Old Persian word for "give".

Absheron, comes from Persian āb šuran "salty waters".

Ganja: The city's traditional Armenian name is Gandzak (Գանձակ), which derives from gandz (գանձ) "precious/treasure," a loan word from Old Iranian, both being Indo-European languages of antiquity, this word is a cognate, which means treasure or riches. The founder of the Hethumid dynasty, Oshin of Lampron was an Armenian nakharar and lord of a castle near Ganja who fled to Cilicia in 1075 during the Seljuk invasion of Armenia. The city existed in pre-Islamic and pre-Turkic times and was likely founded in the 5th century. According to some sources, it changed hands between Persians, Khazars and Arabs even in the 7th century. The area in which Ganja is located was known as Arran from the 9th to 12th century; its urban population spoke mainly in the Persian language.

The name of the country itself is also not of Turkic or Islamic origin, but from the original, pre-Christian, pre-Islamic, pre-Turkic religion of the area practiced by its ancient Caucasian Albanian kings. According to modern etymology, the term Azerbaijan derives from that of Atropates, a Persian satrap/king under the Achaemenid Empire, who was later reinstated as the satrap of Media under Alexander the Great. The original etymology of this name is thought to have its roots in the once-dominant, Zoroastrianism, the ancient religion of Iran, Armenia, Atropatene, Arran, and Caucasian Albania In the Avesta's Frawardin Yasht ("Hymn to the Guardian Angels"), there is a mention of âterepâtahe ashaonô fravashîm ýazamaide, which literally translates from Avestan as "we worship the fravashi of the holy Atropatene." The name "Atropates" itself is the Greek transliteration of an Old Iranian, probably Median, compounded name with the meaning "Protected by the (Holy) Fire" or "The Land of the (Holy) Fire". The Greek name was mentioned by Diodorus Siculus and Strabo. The name Azerbaijan was first adopted for the area of the present-day Republic of Azerbaijan by the government of Musavat in 1918, after the collapse of the Russian Empire, when the independent Azerbaijan Democratic Republic was established. Until then, the designation had been used exclusively to identify the adjacent region of contemporary northwestern Iran,  while the area of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic was formerly referred to as Arran and Shirvan. On that basis Iran protested the newly adopted country name. During the Soviet rule, the country was also spelled in the Roman alphabet from the Russian transliteration as Azerbaydzhan (Азербайджа́н). The country's name was also spelled in Cyrillic script from 1940 to 1991 as "Азәрбајҹан".

These name changes are in addition to those continuously changed from the 1930s on, a measure seen by some as a method to erase from popular memory the fact that migration of Oghuz Turkic people   and the conquest of Muslim Arabs    had once dominated the region, and renamed places and grew to form a substantial portion of the local population. According to Husik Ghulyan's study, in the period 2006-2018, more than 7700 Turkic geographic names that existed in the country have been changed back and returned to original Armenian, Iranian, Caucasian Albanian, and other Indo-Iranian peoples' names. Those Turkic names were mostly used side by side within the different linguistic communities of Armenian and Turkish speakers, with the majority of names being slightly changed, as in the case of Shusha, and located in areas that previously were heavily populated by Azerbaijanis, namely in Gegharkunik, Kotayk and Vayots Dzor regions and some parts of Syunik and Ararat regions.

Though these name "changes" to names which existed for centuries and millennia, may very well show Armenian xenophobia, racism, chauvinism, and bigotry, to say that Turkish names are "original," is the equivalent of saying that English, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, or Italian place names in the Americas are "original," and ignores the Turkic and Arabic changing of the Iranian, Armenian, Caucasian Albanian, Udi, and other names given in the languages of the inhabitants who, according to the overwhelming preponderance of the historical record, lived in the region hundreds, and thousands of years prior to the arrival of the Oghuz Turkic Language, that was being spoken east of Lake Balkhash when the Persian Empires, Satrapy and Kingdom of Armenia, Kingdom of Atropatene, and Caucasian Albania had already each existed for centuries. To decry this, is against the high academic standards of the Azerbaijani people, and amounts to calling Machu Picchu and Chichen Itza "Spanish." It is simply, academically, historically, and factually incorrect, regardless of the level of hate behind such changes, revisions, or reversals.

However, instability in Safavid Iran and Armenian frustration   with Islamic dominance. in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, turned Karabakh into the epicenter of plans for an independent Armenian state. This state, centered on the semi-independent Armenian principalities of Artsakh and Syunik, would be allied with Georgia and both would be protected by fellow Christian Russia and European powers. Eventually the meliks agreed to pursue such an alliance. In 1678, Catholicos Hakob Jughayetsi (Jacob of Jugha, 1655–1680) called for a secret meeting in Echmiadzin to which he invited both meliks and clergy. He offered to lead a delegation to Europe, but died shortly after, largely causing the plan to be abandoned, but for the determination of one of the delegates, a young man, the son of Melik Haikazyan of Kashatag / Khnatsakh in Zankezur / Syunik.  named Israel Ori, who had served in the armies of Louis XIV of France, he tried to convince Johann Wilhelm, Elector Palatine (1658–1716), Pope Innocent XII and the Emperor of Austria,  Leopold I to liberate Armenia from a foreign yoke and to send large amounts of money to the armed forces of Karabakh Armenians. Unfortunately Ori died in 1711 before securing unified support for Armenian lands. Another prominent figure from Nagorno-Karabakh who worked to establish an independent Armenian entity in his homeland was Movses Baghramian. Baghramian together with the Armenian patriot Joseph Emin (1726–1809), lobbied Karabakh's Armenian meliks to this same effect.

In the early 18th century, Persia's Nader Shah took Karabakh out of control of the Ganja khans as punishment for their support of the Safavids, and placed it under his own control in which he granted the Armenian meliks supreme command over neighboring Armenian principalities as well as Muslim khans in the Caucasus, in return for the meliks' victories over the invading Ottoman Turks in the 1720s. However, the Armenian meliks were only able to maintain autonomous control over the region until the mid-18th century.

Karabakh Khanate
The beginning of the end of the Khamsa Melikdoms of Karabakh came in the second half of the 18th century, when Turko-Armenian, Melik Shahnazar II allied himself with the Khan, Panah Ali Khan of the Javanshir clan of the Afshar-Oghuz Turkic tribe, against the other Armenian meliks which led to the disintegration of the autonomous Armenian Melikdoms of Karabakh into the de facto independent Karabakh Khanate. Melik Shahnazar II was the first to accept Panah-Ali Khan's suzerainty as the first Khan of the Karabakh Khanate and provided the latter with the strategic fortress of Shushi (Shusha).