Education 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, where he enrolled at
Yerevan State University.
Academic career As a scholar who was fluent in
Arabic, Ter-Ghevondyan had a profound interest in the history of the medieval Arab
caliphates and
emirates. From 1958 to 1981, he worked at the Institute of History at the
Armenian Academy of Sciences (AAS) with a special emphasis in philology, historiography and the study of historical sources. His first significant work devoted to
Bagratuni Armenia's relations with the Islamic world was
The Arab Emirates in Bagratuni Armenia () and was published in 1965. The book was highly praised and found to be of such great importance that it was translated from Armenian into English by American Byzantine scholar
Nina Garsoïan, and later into Arabic by Aleksan Keshishyan. In 1981, thanks to Ter-Ghevondyan's efforts, the institute of Oriental Studies at the AAS was established and he was appointed to be the inaugural holder of the chair for the study of primary sources. He continued on with his research and in the same year, he completed the translation of the excerpts of the work of the 13th-century Arab chronicler Ibn al-Asir, as part of a series initiated by the AAS to translate historical sources about Armenia and Armenians from their original languages into Armenian. He translated from
classical to modern Armenian, wrote the introductions and commentaries on, in 1982 and 1983 respectively, the works of Armenian historians Ghevond (
History) and
Agatangeghos (
History of Armenia). In 1983, Ter-Ghevondyan became a professor at Yerevan State University and taught the courses "Ancient and Medieval History of the Arab World" and "An Introduction to Arabic Philology." Due to his death in February 1988, many of Ter-Ghevondyan's works were left unpublished. His monograph,
Armenia in 6th to 8th Centuries, was published posthumously in 1996. He was the author of over 100 articles and a regular contributor to the Arab-related entries in the
Soviet Armenian Encyclopedia (1974–1987) and wrote numerous chapters in the second and third volumes of the
History of the Armenian People (vol. 2, 1984; vol. 3, 1976). ==Published works==