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Armenia’s Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan on Saturday reacted to the statements of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev concerning the maps that should be used during the Armenian-Azerbaijani border delimitation process in response to a request for comment by Armenpress news agency.

Question: President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan stated yesterday that the process of clarifying the borders with Armenia will be implemented on the basis of all the maps of 1918 and the once that existed before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and that according to some of the maps of 1918 to 1920, Yerevan and Syunik were allegedly part of Azerbaijan. How would you comment on these statements?

Answer: We are not against the study of the maps. But why consider only the 20th century? We can start from the maps created in Babylon in the 6th century BC, or by Herodotus in the 5th century BC, or by Strabo in the 1st century BC, or created by Claudius Ptolemy in the 2nd century AD, or from the maps created by Pliny the Elder in the same period, and then to continue with numerous Latin, Byzantine, Arabic and other geographical descriptions and maps of later periods. Armenia is not afraid not to find itself on those maps.

However, being interested in the effective work of the forthcoming commission on delimitation and border security, the Republic of Armenia believes that this work should be based on maps that are accepted by both sides and have legal force.