of the early Armenian literature is accounted for by the fact that
Christianity was preached there in the first century after Christ, by
the apostles Thaddeus and Bartholomew, and that the Armenian Church is
the oldest national Christian Church in the world.

It is no doubt owing to the conversion of the entire Armenian nation
under the passionate preaching of Gregory the Illuminator that most of
the literary products, of primitive Armenia--the mythological legends
and chants of heroic deeds sung by bards--are lost. The Church would
have none of them. Gregory not only destroyed the pagan temples, but he
sought to stamp out the pagan literature--the poetry and recorded
traditions that celebrated the deeds of gods and goddesses and of
national heroes. He would have succeeded, too, had not the romantic
spirit of the race clung fondly to their ballads and folk-lore.
Ecclesiastical historiographers in referring to those times say quaintly
enough, meaning to censure the people, that in spite of their great
religious advantages the Armenians persisted in singing some of their
heathen ballads as late as the twelfth century. Curiously enough, we owe
the fragments we possess of early Armenian poetry to these same
ecclesiastical critics. These fragments suggest a popular poesy,
stirring and full of powerful imagery, employed mostly in celebrating
royal marriages, religious feasts, and containing dirges for the dead,
and ballads of customs--not a wide field, but one invaluable to the
philologist and to ethnological students.

The Christian chroniclers and critics, however, while preserving but
little of the verse of early Armenia, have handed down to us many
legends and traditions, though they relate them, unfortunately, with
much carelessness and with a contempt for detail that is often
exasperating to one seeking for instructive parallelisms between the