Inscribed Surfaces, Layered Identities: Hidden Armenian Histories in Non-Armenian Metalwork
Objects in the history of art frequently carry more than one cultural identity, since a single surface can accumulate successive layers of making, ownership, dedication, and reuse, each introduced at a different moment and by a different hand. The Qianlong emperor, for instance, ordered inscriptions to be cut into ancient Shang and Zhou bronzes in his collection, so that a ritual vessel from the second millennium BCE now bears an eighteenth-century imperial poem and seal. What such objects record is not a single act of creation but a sequence of custody. An inscription added long after manufacture repositions an earlier artefact within a later framework of value, memory or devotion, and the object consequently belongs to two chronologies at once.
Armenian art is conventionally described through a vocabulary of patronage and ethnic authorship: a work is Armenian because Armenians commissioned it, Armenian hands executed it, or Armenian religious and communal institutions housed it. The model is sound as far as it goes. Still, it leaves out a category of material whose manufacture belongs to other traditions and whose Armenian character is established only by a later inscription. The explanation is largely geographical and economic. Armenian merchants, craftsmen and clerics moved continuously between the Armenian highlands, the Caucasus, Persia and the Ottoman cities; the early modern diaspora produced dense networks of trade, pilgrimage and endowment; and Armenian communities routinely inherited, purchased or received as gifts objects made by their neighbours. In these circumstances, the inscription became an instrument of appropriation, commemoration and legal claim, converting an acquired object into an Armenian document. One of the clearest surviving examples of this process is a drop-earring in the Benaki Museum, Athens.
The earring (ΕΑ 2131) is fashioned from a gold histamenon of the Byzantine emperor Michael VII Ducas, who reigned from 1071 to 1078. Michael came to the throne in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Manzikert, the defeat that cost Byzantium most of its Anatolian provinces and that is conventionally treated as the opening of the empire’s long decline; he inherited a treasury already strained and a coinage already debased, and he was overthrown in 1078 by a popular revolt that ended the Ducas dynasty’s direct hold on power. His gold histamenon nonetheless remained the principal high-value coin of the eastern Mediterranean in the generation that followed. Western sources knew it as the michaelaton or michelois, and it circulated widely in Italy, especially in the south, because its gold content was virtually equivalent to the popular Sicilian tarì. For the participants of the First Crusade in the 1090s, and for the early kingdom of Jerusalem, Michael’s coin was the standard unit of high-value currency encountered in the Levant. The coin therefore travelled far beyond the borders of the empire that struck it, and it did so as money before it became anything else.
What is significant for the present argument is that Michael’s histamenon was also, and independently, treated as an object to be worn. Many surviving examples are pierced or mounted: five of the twelve gold coins of Michael VII in the British Museum are pierced, and the Dumbarton Oaks collection includes five pierced examples together with another fitted with a suspension loop. A pierced histamenon of Michael VII recovered in England was classified as jewellery rather than currency, and the positioning of the piercing shows that the hole was placed to display the emperor’s portrait rather than the image of Christ, which indicates a deliberate choice about what the wearer wished to be seen. One example in trade carries runic graffiti, plausibly cut by a Germanic mercenary serving in the Varangian Guard, who may have marked the coin as his own property after receiving it as pay. Another is reported with graffiti in Greek and Arabic. These are not Armenian cases, but they establish a general principle: Byzantine gold of this period was routinely detached from its monetary function and reinscribed within the visual and personal economies of other cultures.
The Benaki earring belongs to this wider phenomenon and gives it a specifically Armenian form. The coin was later set in a filigree frame and inscribed in Armenian. The inscription identifies the object as a birthday gift, dated 26 May, and the year may be read as either 1311 or 1911 of the Armenian era—that is, 1862 or the twentieth century—the third digit being difficult to decipher. The museum’s attribution to the eighteenth century therefore appears imprecise, and the divergence between catalogue description and epigraphic evidence is a useful reminder that inscriptions must be read as documents rather than as decoration. The mounting of coins as jewellery was widespread in nineteenth-century Armenian urban culture, where filigree and coin-set ornaments formed part of a distinctive bourgeois and ecclesiastical taste; the owner of this earring chose to preserve a foreign coin rather than melt it, and inscribed it with a date, an occasion and a name. The object records a family memory as much as a monetary value, and the Armenian inscription is what turns an inherited coin into a document of Armenian memory.
Taken together, the object demonstrates that the Armenian inscription functioned as a documentary instrument, capable of converting a piece of foreign currency into a birthday gift, a memorial, or a marker of possession. The inscription constitutes an archive written onto the surface of the object, independent of the manufacture and style of the work that carries it. It is worth pausing on the physical modesty of such an intervention. A few lines of script around the rim of a coin are easily overlooked in a display case, where the eye goes first to the gold and the filigree; the inscription is small, often worn, sometimes relegated to the last line of a label or omitted altogether. This is precisely why the histories it carries have remained hidden. The insignificance is optical rather than historical. The smallest intervention on the surface of an object may record the most consequential change in its life, and the scholar’s task is to reverse the hierarchy of attention that the display case imposes.
What makes the intervention decisive is not only that Armenians wrote, but that they wrote in Armenian. The alphabet devised by Mesrop Mashtots in the early fifth century was from its inception an instrument of religious and cultural cohesion, giving Armenian a written form independent of Greek, Syriac and Persian. In dispersion, the script became portable in a way that territory and institutions were not: it could be carried, taught, copied and cut into any surface, anywhere. To inscribe an object in Armenian letters was therefore to make a declaration in the most economical and durable form available—that this object now belonged to an Armenian world, that a named Armenian had held it, given it, or asked to be remembered by it. The language of the inscription is not incidental to its documentary function; it is the signature of belonging.
The Benaki earring is the clearest surviving example of this process, but it is unlikely to be the only one. Other objects carry Armenian inscriptions added after manufacture, and some may belong to the same category, though the evidence needed to establish the claim—secure dating of the object, independent documentation of the inscription, and clear provenance—is frequently incomplete. Future research must therefore publish these inscriptions and develop criteria precise enough to separate later intervention from original commission, a separation the Benaki earring shows to be both possible and consequential. The broader implication concerns the history of Armenian art, which has long asked what Armenians made when it might also ask what they marked, preserved and transmitted, placing Armenian material culture within the wider history of cross-cultural exchange.
