Utik

Utik (Ուտիք, also known as Uti, Utiq, or Outi) was a historic province of the Kingdom of Armenia. It was ceded to Caucasian Albania following the partition of Armenia between Sassanid Persia and the Eastern Roman Empire in 387 AD. Most of the region is located within present-day Azerbaijan immediately west of the Kura River, while a part of it lies within the Tavush province of present-day northeastern Armenia. According to Strabo, in the 2nd century BC, Armenians conquered from the Medes the lands of Syunik and Caspiane, and the lands that lay between them, including Utik, that was populated by the people called Utis, after whom it received its name. Modern historians agree that "Utis" were a people of non-Armenian origin, and the modern ethnic group of Udi is their descendants. According Robert Hewsen, the mountainous part of Utik (according to the administrative boundaries of Greater Armenia), Gardman and Tavush was a homeland of proto-Armenian tribes. According to classical sources, Armenians settled as far as the Kura River in about the 7th century BC. After the conquest of Armenia in the 4th or 2nd century BC Utik still had also Armenian population. The province was called Otena in Latin sources and Otene in Greek sources. According to the Armenian geographer Anania Shirakatsi's Ashkharatsuyts ("Geography", 7th century), Utik was the 12th among the 15 provinces of the Kingdom of Armenia, and belonged, at the time, to the Caucasian Albania (when the Utik and Artsakh provinces were lost by Armenia after its partition in the 4th century). According to Ashkharatsuyts, Utik consisted of 8 cantons (gavars, in Armenian): Aranrot, Tri, Rotparsyan, Aghve, Tuskstak (Tavush), Gardman, Shakashen, and Uti. The province was bounded by the Kura River from north-east, river Arax from south-east, and by the province of Artsakh from the west. Greco-Roman historians from the 2nd century BC to the 4th century AD state that Utik was a province of Armenia, with the Kura River separating Armenia and Albania.