This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

This book explores the genealogy of the concept of 'Medz Yeghern' ('Great Crime'), the Armenian term for the mass murder and ethnic cleansing of the Armenian ethno-religious group in the Ottoman Empire between the years 1915-1923. Widely accepted by historians as one of the classical cases of genocide in the 20th century, ascribing the right definition to the crime has been a source of contention and controversy in international politics. Vartan Matiossian here draws upon extensive research based on Armenian sources, neglected in much of the current historiography, as well as other European languages in order to trace the development of the concepts pertaining to mass killing and genocide of Armenians from the ancient to the modern periods. Beginning with an analysis of the term itself, he shows how the politics of its use evolved as Armenians struggled for international recognition of the crime after 1945, in the face of Turkish protest. Taking a combined historical, philological, literary and political perspective, the book is an insightful exploration of the politics of naming a catastrophic historical event, and the competitive nature of national collective memories.

The title Favet Neptunus Eunti, Latin for “Neptune favors the traveler,” looks at the traveling nature of the Armenian merchant-banking Mouradian family. Written in three parts, the book chronicles 700 years of Mouradian family history in five continents beginning with a description of both the family’s pre-twentieth century life and merchant trade route spanning the Eastern hemisphere from Singapore to Manchester and Marseille. It then focuses on the family's Chungoush (Çüngüş) branch by providing a biography of the last chatelain of the city’s Mouradentz Abarankn, Sarkis Agha Mouradian, his wife Mariam Khatoun (née Karagheusian), their children, and their control of the family’s outposts in Kharpert (Harput), Aleppo, Turkmenistan, and Singapore leading up to, and during, the 1915 Armenian Genocide. Lastly, it follows Sarkis Agha and Mariam Khatoun's descendants as they integrated into various countries after World War I and established a presence in business, legal, political, entertainment, and culinary industries. Whereas the foreword and epilogue to the book remain specific to the Mouradians, the methodological introduction to the book, “Seeing and Being Seen: Methods of Witnessing the Unwitnessable,” strays momentarily from the family and focuses more generally on torture as both the primary mechanism of genocide and the principal obstacle to documenting it, while proposing a means to overcoming this paradox. Research for the book is based on: - roughly 26 hours of recorded and previously unpublished interviews from now-deceased survivors of the Genocide and their descendants; - 13 public and private archives located in Italy, France, Turkey, and the United States of America; - 161 primary and secondary sources, along with over 50 previously unpublished private correspondence and governmental documents translated from Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, Japanese, Armenian, and French into English; - 26 nineteenth century Ottoman certificates of property title covering a portion of the family’s Chungoush property holdings, which are annexed, including both scans of the documents and their complete translation from the original Ottoman Turkish to English. The text is accompanied with over 400 illustrations, comprising of photographs of family members, properties, jewels, personal effects, documents, and maps of both the family’s trade and escape routes. The book is a limited hardcover edition in oversize format with lithograph printing on acid-free paper, Smyth sewn signatures, reinforced library binding, as well as gold and silver gilding to the cover.