Rafayel Ishkhanian

He was a deputy in the Supreme Council (predecessor to the National Assembly) of the Republic of Armenia from 1991 until his death 1995.

With the emergence of the Karabakh movement and the independence movement in Armenia, Ishkhanyan also wrote about Armenian-Turkish relations, developing the concept of "the law of excluding the third force" (which was the title of his book published in 1991), which posits that Armenians should not look to a "third force" (i.e., Russia or the West) in order to achieve their national goals and should independently establish relations with their neighbors.

From 1955 to 1963 he held various positions at the National Library of Armenia and at Matenadaran. From 1963 to 1992 he worked at the department of philology of Yerevan State University, teaching modern Armenian, dialect studies, and the history of Armenian literature and language.

Rafayel Avetisi Ishkhanyan (Armenian: Ռաֆայել Ավետիսի Իշխանյան, 9 March 1922 – 6 February 1995) was an Armenian linguist, philologist and historian. He was a professor of the Yerevan State University.

Ishkhanyan was born in Yerevan in 1922 to Bolshevik revolutionaries Avetis and Haykanush Ishkhanian. His father Avetis was executed in 1937 during the Great Purge. In 1939, Ishkhanyan entered the department of philology of Yerevan State University (YSU). He was called up for military service in 1940 and participated in World War II, during which he was wounded and taken prisoner, then released from imprisonment and continued his service. After demobilization, he continued his studies and graduated from YSU in 1949. In 1954 he graduated from the Moscow State Library Institute. In 1973 he defended his doctoral dissertation on the subject "History of the language of new Armenian literature".