Urartu.

This hopelessly famous and hopelessly obscure Caucasian kingdom was
wrecked by the Assyrians in the 600s BCE. Tiglath-Pileser III,
Shalmanser V and Sargon II were all involved (these personalities are
also recorded in the Bible).

It seems the Urartian king wiped out some northerly, easterly, and
westerly states for some obscure reason in response to the aggression
of Assyria; perhaps these states had given earth and water, as the
Persians would later put it. When Assyria wiped out Urartu, they
merely sacked, pillaged and burned; those not worth deporting as
slaves were killed; Assyria then withdrew from this part of the
Caucasus, leaving it to itself. We have a political and socioeconomic
vacuum.

Nature and political science abhors a vacuum (consider what the Slavs
did after the Hunnic Confederacy collapsed). It is not unreasonable to
see the Armenians as being almost sucked up into this vacuum, a force
of nature sucking them up into the political and economic space
formerly occupied by the (now-remnant) Urartian people: the Armenians
actually might have been *invited* to take over, considering the utter
chaos which must have reigned.

You can almost see little Urartian family groups helping the Armenians
go up the river to settle the area -- one Urartian clan helping
unrelated foreigners annihilate another closely-related Urartian clan.

The Caucasus is peripheral to a number of historic empires, but has
never really been a long-term-item province-wise: it's too hard to
hold and maintain considering the economic return. The whole history
of the region is long-term linguistic stability countermanded by the
success of those peripheral to it. Sargon II did to what is now
Armenia more or less what Putin is doing to Chechnya or what Taliban
is doing to portions of Afganistan.

Of course, you have to accept that the Armenians were elsewhere, more
or less camped on the shores of the Caspian for this to be the way it
was (Azerbaijan). But then, this is also when Medes and Persians
started to do their thing. It's as if, for a moment in history,
disorder in the Caucasus affected their neighbors instead of the usual
other way around.

Sargon II is sorta like Hitler. He really did mess up ethnic and
linguistic boundaries, wrecking everthing in his wake.

Assyria messed up the Middle East -- and the Caucasus. Sorta like what
Attila did to Ukraine and places west.

Imagine a world-war fought mainly in the Caucasus.