Ter-Ghevondyan was born in Cairo , Egypt to an Armenian family which had fled from the town of Marash in the Ottoman Empire during the massacres of the Armenian Genocide . In the late 1940s , his family repatriated to Soviet Armenia and there he was immediately admitted to Yerevan State University . Ter-Ghevondyan graduated from the university 's department of philology of Oriental languages in 1954 . Pursuing higher studies , he was accepted to the Oriental Studies Department at Leningrad State University . There , he met the renowned Armenian scholars Hrachia Acharian and Joseph Orbeli . He was especially fond of the guidance and advice Orbeli provided him with , as he repeatedly remarked after he had completed his studies , " Once more , fortune had smiled upon me , for my adviser was Academician Hovsep Joseph Orbeli . " He defended his dissertation , '' The Emirate of Dvin from the Ninth to Eleventh Centuries '' , and was awarded his '' kandidat nauk '' in 1958
Armenian Genocide
Armenian Genocide
Aram Ter-Ghevondyan