I keep seeing a lot of maps mostly coming out of unknown sources, some like this one showing "historical Armenia" basically stretching between Caspian, Mediterranean, and Black seas.
If "historical Armenia" existed, what was the time period, and the geographic range of it?
Considering the claimed geographical range, why is there so little recorded interactions between "historical Armenia" and the Umayyad/Abbasids/Seljukes or any other known civilization? Additionally what was there interaction with these groups that can be confirmed with solid historical records?
I would apperciate the questions answered with use of primary/historical sources, and without use of Armenian sources/writers/historians. (For example, with the Seljuks and Byzantines, there are clear non-Seljuk/non-Byzantine sources for battle of Manzikert, proving that not only such a thing as "seljuks" and "byzantines" existed but also and giving a rough idea of their bounderies based on location of the battles. Just as an example, there are old french manuscripts depicting the battle of Manzikert. Just based on that we know Byzantines existed, Seljuks existed. The key point here is that there is third party sources from that time period which survived till today for us to examine to see confirmation of the existence of these two groups.) Is there such historical third party confirmation of existance of "historical Armenia" as a geographic entity with roughly known bounderies?
Yes, absolutely, it's just you've come across a map with a quite nonsensical, and utterly false definition of Armenia as a country, i.e. as in a historical geographical region.
Any pre-genocidal map that covers the area and has geographical labels will likely have Armenia labeled over the area around Lake Van. I can give a few examples although it does like a bit of a redundancy to do so given the ubiquity of Armenia across historical maps:
Considering the claimed geographical range, why is there so little recorded interactions between "historical Armenia" and the Umayyad/Abbasids/Seljukes or any other known civilization?
Armenia existed as an emirate with that exact name under the Umayyads and the Abbasids, in an area stretching across the Armenian Highland. It existed as a marzpanate of the Sassanian Empire prior to that, and as an independent kingdom or vassal state across that same area prior to that.
To be able to answer the question meaningfully, where do you see such little interaction with historical Armenia and these empires? For example, the geography book Hudud al-Alam (tr. Minorsky pp. 142-45) considered "Azerbaijan, Arrān, and Armenia as the pleasantest of all the Islamic lands", demonstrating that it was certainly understand as a country within the Islamic world.
