Talk:Movses of Khoren

Perhaps this article is more aptly named Moses of Chorene's History of Armenia? The article has paragraph or two about the author and the rest of it is about the book he wrote and its impact.

Or Perhaps we should create an article about the book, copy the text here about the book into that new article and reference it here?

Dating

I changed this a bit because the new version could not necessarily be inferred from Thomson's statement. I'm no great expert here and I need to get my hands on more books, but as far as I see it we need to determine whether:

Moses was an historical person (probably of the 5th century) but the history written in his name was "fathered" on him by later author(s) unknown (I've seen the date for the history given variously as the 8th or 9th centuries but I can't give references)
Moses didn't exist at all and his biography was also part of the fabrication of the history's authorship
or there was a Moses of Chorene, who was the author of the history, but he lived after the 7th century

I don't have the sources to sort this out at the moment. If anybody can get hold of them, it would be a help. I'd just like to say though that I'm glad to see someone is taking a more scholarly approach to this and other Armenian historical articles. Cheers. --Folantin 09:56, 7 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I understand what you are saying, but I believe this is a bit similar to the Homeric question. Except that he has a whole bunch of works attributed to him, and for each the question will be, is it authentic. I believe that "Moses of Chorene" is the author of the History more or less by definition, and if that work dates to the 7th century, we will be right to say that Moses lived in the 7th century (even if Moses is a pen-name). But I agree we need more sources on this. dab (𒁳) 09:12, 8 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. I've read a bit about the academic controversy over his dating/existence but I can't remember the exact details. When I added the Thomson quotation, the article here was a straight copy-and-paste of the Catholic Encyclopaedia entry (from c.1913). They were beginning to become aware of the doubts over the traditional attribution back then, but obviously a lot has happened since in the debate. I slashed quite a bit of the entry, but I didn't know how far to go. Obviously, better sourcing will fix this. I hope to get my hands on the French translation (1993) some time this year, so that might help resolve matters. Those who don't believe he was from the 5th century give various dates so I'm not sure we can just say 7th century. In fact, I think the 9th century is a pretty popular guess (though I can't provide references). We'll probably have to describe the scholarly debate rather than coming down for one date or another. I think we should just leave its as something like "considerably later than the 5th century" for now. --Folantin 09:25, 8 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

One more name change

I really don't know what Wikipedia's (English-language) policy is on this but I'm considering to move this article once more to Movses Khorenatsi to reflect the correct transliteration of the historian's name. We have several other articles that are like this (Kirakos Gandzaketsi, Stepanos Taronetsi, Movses Kaghankatvatsi, etc.) so unless anyone has some concerns, we can move it to Movses Khorenatsi.--Marshal Bagramyan (talk) 01:35, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm fine with both transliterations (ex. Gregory of Narek, Anania Shirakatsi). If we're going to make either universal, wouldn't we also have to move articles on monarchs like Tiridates I of Armenia to Trdat I? Hakob (talk) 08:20, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think so. The "of Armenia" part is mainly to differentiate them from the Parthian kings of the same names. I don't think we have to really extend this to those other articles either, only those which have suffix "tsi", identifying from where they were from. I guess the closest thing we can compare this to is the Leonardo da Vinci article, since his name just means "Leonardo from/of Vinci."--Marshal Bagramyan (talk) 19:42, 5 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]