The Caspian Sea and other Great Lakes

The Caspian Sea separates the Caucasus from Central Asia and is bounded on its southern shore by Iran. Despite its name, the Caspian Sea is actually a lake, because it contains fresh, as opposed to salt, water and does not empty into an ocean. In fact it is the world's largest lake, at more than 143,000 square miles (370,370 square kilometers) —which means that this "lake" is about the size of Montana. No wonder, then, that geographers called it a "sea."

By contrast, the second-largest lake in the world, Lake Superior on the U. S.-Canadian border, is 31,700 square miles (82,103 square kilometers), or less than one-fourth the size of the Caspian Sea. Lake

Victoria in Africa, at the mouth of the Nile River, is the third largest, at just under

27,000 square miles (69,930 square kilometers). Fourth is the Aral Sea, about 200 miles east of the Caspian in Central Asia, at slightly less than 25,000 square miles (64,750 square kilometers); fifth is Lake Huron (23,000 square miles or 59,570 square kilometers), which like Lake Superior is one of the Great Lakes. All four of these lakes, plus the fifth - and sixth-largest in the world—respectively, Lake Michigan of the Great Lakes and Lake Tanganyika (tahn-gahn-YEE-kuh) in Africa—could fit inside the Caspian Sea, and there would still be almost 2,000 square miles (5,180 square kilometers) to spare!

Europe. But the empire did not last long: the Romans took most of Armenia's lands in the years between 69 and 66 b. c.

Nor was this the end of Armenia's unfortunate dealings with Rome: Tigranes's son, Artavasdes III (ahr-uh-VAZ-deez; c. 55-34 B. C.), found himself caught in the middle of a struggle between the Roman consul Octavian (later Caesar Augustus) on the one hand and Cleopatra and Mark Antony on the other. Antony and Cleopatra had him captured and executed.

In A. D. 66, the Roman emperor Nero crowned a prince of the Parthians, then ruling over Persia, as vassal king of Armenia. Later, in a. d. 303, Armenia became the first country in the world to adopt Christianity as its national religion. During the period from the 200s to the 600s a. d., Armenia changed hands between the Persian and Roman/Byzantine empires many times.