PanARMENIAN.Net - Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan has responded to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev statement that the process of clarifying the borders with Armenia will be based on all the maps beginning from 1918 and to those that existed before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Aliyev maintained that according to some of the maps of 1918-1920, Yerevan and the province of Syunik were allegedly part of Azerbaijan.

"We are not against researching maps. But why limit ourselves to 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 has no fear of not finding itself on those maps," A.

However, given that we are interested in the effective work of the future Commission on demarcation 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 value.

Aliyev has said on numerous occasions that the Armenian capital of Yerevan, Sevan and Syunik are all "historical lands" of Azerbaijan.