Father Minas Pzhshgian (1777-1851) was one of the grand artisans of the Western-Armenian vernacular. He composed in 1812, in the vernacular, the first Armenian musicological book. He also produced the first modern Armenian translation of a literary work, The New Robinson (1817). In 1819, he published what must be considered the first real book in the modern language written without a didactic or a scholastic purpose: Patmut'iun Pontosi (History of Pontus).

In this book, we can read the form taken by the national imagination in its inaugural moment, and its archeological expression. This book (and, massively, its author) was crossed off the maps or charts that the national memory drew up in producing its own history. With History of Pontus, we already have a geographical archeology doubled by a travel narrative; here, however, the monuments that the author describes, the sites through which he passes, the ruins, the inventory of which he draws from previous travelers in the Pontus, Arrian and Tournefort, are all of Greek origin. It is thus easy to understand why the nationalist tradition has completely ignored Pzhshgean, although he was the representative par excellence of the national imagination in its archeological phase. With him, we are following the steps of "Neoarmenism" in statu nascendi, as a copy of Neohellenism. But we also see how these hesitant beginnings were the bearers of a different kind of thught. This helps us understand that the nationalism that rewrites history to its own ends was not inevitable.