Siamanto was born Atom Erjanian in 1878 in the town of Akn (formerly within the Ottoman Empire, now Kemaliye, Turkey). Siamanto, who derived his pen name from a Kurdish epic hero, was educated in Constantinople and in Paris at the Sorbonne, and spent significant periods of time abroad in Europe and in the U.S., living in Boston from 1909 until 1911. Siamanto's composition of the Saint Mesrop cycle, his last published work (Tiflis, 1913) before his murder in the Armenian Genocide of 1915, was in commemoration of the fifteen hundredth anniversary of Mesrop Ma…toc''s invention of the Armenian alphabet.