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Armenians start to develop their own culture.

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Birth of Christ.

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St. Gregory the Illuminator converts the Armenians to Christianity from Paganism. They become the first Christian nation in the world.

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Armenians were conquered by the Muslim Arabs

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The Armenians were absorbed by the Muslim Ottoman Empire, but they remained Christian.

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Ottoman Empire is in a state of decline, due to various reasons, including corruption.

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The Emperor of the Ottoman Empire decreed that all subjects, regardless of religion, were equal and were to have equal rights.

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Sultan Abdul Hamid II ascended to the Ottoman Empire. This was a ruler determined to restore the glory of the empire, at any cost. He believed he had to deal with religious minorities in the empire, such as the Armenians, who were making demands for more rights and even independence. He did this by encouraging Muslim refugees and nomadic groups, like the Kurds, to settle in Armenian land. This led to conflict over land, ending up with the Muslims, backed by the government, confiscating a lot of Armenian land.

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Sultan Hamid falsely accused the Armenians of rebelling against him. He allowed local Muslims to attack Armenians, backing them up with the Ottoman army. His purpose was to permanently end the Armenians' demands for equal rights. Some 200,000 Armenians were killed or died from starvation. This was a precursor to the genocide to come later.

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A group of political leaders, calling themselves the Young Turks, overthrew Sultan Hamid and seeked to restore the glory of the Old Ottoman Empire. They pushed "Pan-Turkism" - a policy to make the empire solely Muslim and Turkish speaking.

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The Young Turks named the Armenians as an enemy of the Muslims of Turkey.

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Turkey entered WW1 with the side of the Germans. They hoped that the Germans would help them defeat the Russians in Central Asia, allowing the Turks to acquire new lands of Turkish-speaking people.

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A Turkish military offensive against Russia ended up as a disaster. The Turkish people scapegoated the Armenians, blaming them for aiding the Russians.

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Turkish authorities arrested Armenian leaders, whether it be religious, political, or cultural, in Constantinople. They then imprisoned and executed them, marking the start of the Armenian Genocide.
Even the Allied Forces took notice of the horrific atrocities and issued a warning to the government of Turkey in May 1915.

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The Turkish government ordered the deportation of all the Armenians from Turkey to Syria and Iraq. Though some people helped the Armenians, most of the Muslim world applauded the expulsion of them. Most of the time, officials would immediately shoot any able-bodied men who could survive the walk to the deserts of Syria and Iraq. They then forced the women, children, and elderly to walk hundreds of miles into the deserts, given little to no food, water, shelter, or protection. Along the way, bandits, local people, and even the people assigned to protect the Armenians would rob, murder, and rape them. Some of these attackers were composed of former prison convicts, released solely to kill the Armenians. Only 1/4 of the Armenians who left made it to Syria and Iraq.

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On Mt. Moses, Armenian Villagers fiercely resisted the Turkish order to be deported. They took defensive positions on a mountain slope, holding out for 53 days. 4,000 Armenians escaped by ships to Egypt, where they lived in refugee camps till the war ended.

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The Turks lost WW1. The leaders of the Young Turks fled the country, to be replaced by a new sultan,  who was hostile to their regime. He tried the Young Turks for their war crimes, including the "massacre and destruction of the Armenians."

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The Ottoman Empire fell. A Turkish war hero, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founded a Turkish Republic. He released all prisoners of war crimes, though the Young Turk leaders were later assassinated by vengeful Armenians. He then signed a peace treaty with the winners of World War I, agreeing to set up an Armenian Republic, cutting out a portion of Turkey's land. This was short-lived, however, after it was attacked by Ataturk and reclaimed. The Armenians were forgotten by many, though the Soviet Union carved up a bit of land for its Armenians residents.

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Turkey still has yet to accept that any genocide against the Armenians was carried out. After World War 2, the genocide of the Jews committed by the Nazi party pushed the Armenian Genocide farther back in their minds.