Origins
The Armenian national ideology developed long after the Greek movement, however the factors contributing to the emergence of Armenian nationalism made the movement far more similar to that of the Greeks than those of other ethnic groups. Enlightenment among Armenians, sometimes called as renaissance of the Armenian people, came from two sources; First one was the Armenian monks belonging to the Mekhitarist Order. Second one was the socio-political developments of the 19th century, mainly "French Revolution" and establishment of "Russian revolutionary though." Mekhitarist Order had exclusive devotion to persons and things Armenian. Amongst their countrymen the influence of the monks has been not only directive in the way of holiness and true service to God and the Church, but creative of a wholesome national ambition and self-respect. Apostles of culture and progress, they may be said, with strict justice, to have preserved from degradation and neglect the language and literature of their country, and in so doing, have been the saviors of the Armenian race.
In the Ottoman Empire, the social structure of "Armenians" before the 18th century was based on the system of "Millet," The Armenian Millet, part of Millet (Ottoman Empire), was a confessional communities in the Ottoman Empire. Confessional communities on local issues were functioning like the autonomous territories. The Ottoman millet specifically referred to the separate legal courts pertaining to personal law under which sections of the society were allowed to rule themselves with fairly little interference from the central system. Each millet was under the supervision of an Ethnarch ('national' leader), most often a religious hierarch. Armenian millet was under the Armenian Apostolic Church. The Millets had a great deal of power - they set their own laws and collected and distributed their own taxes. As the people of "The Book" Armenians were able to maintain their houses of worship, obtain religious literature, and employ clergy of their faith for their congregations. These were rights given in the local level. These rights become limited with the economic and technological developments of the 18th century. The ottoman citizens wanted representation in national level. They wanted to have participation more than local level.
The 18th century generated new schools and libraries and chance to study in the universities of Western Europe for different elasticities of the Ottoman Empire. Here they came into contact with the radical ideas of the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Educated and influential members of the large diaspora tried to transmit these ideas back to their own, with the double aim of raising their educational level and simultaneously strengthening their national identity. The Greeks were thus the first of the Ottoman Empire's subject peoples to secure recognition as an independent sovereign power. After a long and bloody struggle, and with the aid of the Great Powers, the Greek Revolution win independence for Greece from the Ottoman Empire granted by the Treaty of Constantinople in July 1832.
Beyond the mostly accepted terms of the Armenian nationalism as given in the above paragraphs, the concept has come to include a range of pseudohistoric interpretations of Prehistoric Armenia, including the idea of linking it to the Iron Age kingdom of Urartu. The Armenians are the "original inhabitants" of the territory of what is named as historic Armenia. The Armenian claim against the other inhabitants of the period. The suggestion that the Armenians had also been newcomers to the region, might rise, within the logic of ethnic nationalism. The correct possibility that against the Armenian claims to the territory (people living in the resgion) were "morally equal". Identification with the distant glories of Urartu and its prehistoric forerunners can be used to reassert Armenian "indigeneity" and "compensate for modern miseries", and together with Mount Ararat has come to be a powerful symbol of Armenian ethnicity especially among the second generation diaspora (Redgate 1995).
The idea which claims people living under Urartu were consciously Armenian, essentialist interpretations of Armenian ethnicity over the ages abound in Armenian historiography, and flourished particularly during the Soviet era, with examples such as S. A. Sardarian's Pervobytnoye obshchestvo v Amenii of 1967 which besides "numerous plagiarisms and mistakes" goes as far as to postulate a separate Armenian race native to the Armenian plateau, and attributes the invention of metallurgy to the Armenians (Kohl and Tsetskhladze 1995). Heavily slanted depictions of Urartu are common in this literature. Armenian historical view must explain why Urartian epigraphy is in the non-Indo-European Urartian language. While there are reasonable scholarly scenarios that there was a Proto-Armenian component in Urartu, and that the early Armenians were the bona fide cultural heirs to Urartu, but the essentialist view of Armenian nationhood that simply equates Urartu with Armenia cannot be sustained (Kohl and Tsetskhladze 1995).
Read more about this topic: Armenian National Awakening
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