Armenians are the original inhabitants of much of the territory of historic Armenia, and the Turks cannot claim presence in Anatolia prior to the Seljuk conquests of the 11th century. The suggestion that the Armenians had also been newcomers to the region, even if 1500 years earlier than the Turks, might rise, within the logic of ethnic nationalism, the possibility that Turkish and Armenian claims to the territory 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).