Utik

thumb|300px|Utik within the Kingdom of Armenia in 150 AD. The area around the confluence of the Kura and Arax is placed in Paytakaran instead of Utik, per Yeremian but rejected by Hewsen and Harutiunian. Utik (), also known as Uti, was a historical province and principality within the Kingdom of Armenia. It was ceded to Caucasian Albania following the partition of Armenia between Sassanid Persia and the Eastern Roman Empire in 387 AD. Most of the region is located within present-day Azerbaijan immediately west of the Kura River, while a part of it lies within the Tavush province of present-day northeastern Armenia.

== Name == In Armenian sources, Utik is also called , , 'land of the people of Utik', 'district of the people of Utik', and 'Utian land/district'. In Suren Yeremian's view, the name originally referred to the district of Uti Arandznak ('Uti Proper'), where the Utian () tribe lived, and was later applied to the larger province. It is identified with the place names in Ptolemy's Geography, in the Latin Ravenna Cosmography, by Pliny, and Ūdh in the Arabic history Futuh al-Buldan by al-Baladhuri. It may also be identifiable with the land called Ouitia by Strabo, although others have placed Strabo's Ouitia on the northwestern or southern shore of the Caspian Sea. According to Robert H. Hewsen, the name of Utik is likely connected with the ethnonyms , mentioned by Herodotus, , mentioned by Strabo, and , mentioned by Pliny. Pliny also mentions a group called the , which suggests that this is a separate group from the Udini, and the , whose name is thought to be a combination of '' and , another group. Wolfgang Schulze writes that and Uti(k) are not necessarily related and may refer to two distinct regions. Udi-/Uti- may be an old toponym referring to the lowlands between the Kura River, the Arax, and the mountains of Karabakh. The place name is related to the name of the Udi people, who live in the South Caucasus today north of the Kura, mainly in the village of Nij in Azerbaijan (see the Population section below). Later, Utik and neighboring Artsakh were known as Karabakh, with the territory of Utik forming the lowland or steppe part of Karabakh. Its territory also overlapped with the region known as Arran, which in its strict sense referred to the area between the Kur and Arax rivers and in its broader sense encompassed the eastern South Caucasus.