by Scott McGill
The early Christian kings of Kʻartʻli did not embrace the central tenets of eastern Roman imperial ideology. Crucial among these were Roman republicanism and Eusebius’s theory of Christian kingship, the basic premise of which prevailed in the Romano‐Byzantine Empire for a thousand years (for the former, see Kaldellis 2015). Instead, Kʻartʻvelian monarchs developed their own paradigm, which synthesized traditional Iranic elements with (Judaeo‐) Christian ones. The creative fusion of traditions is illustrated by the claimed descent of the Christian Chosroids from Nimrod. As was the case elsewhere in the Near East, the biblical hunter was reimagined as the initiator of potent kingship upon the Earth and as the first monarch of Iran (Rapp 2014b). Although the tenor of Vaxtang’s interaction with the Sasanian Empire was highly variable (in moments of tension with the Christian Romans, the Iranians sometimes attempted to shatter the Kʻartʻvelian kings’ attachment to Christianity), words are put into Vaxtang’s mouth applauding Zoroastrianism as an honorable faith. The Christian hero‐king even comes to the defense of Zoroastrianism: “Although the Iranians are not in the true religion yet they know God the Creator and believe in the spiritual life” (Qauxcˇʻišvili 1955, p. 193 = Thomson 1996, p. 209).
A third Georgian‐language historiographical narrative was produced around the year 800. The untitled continuation of The Life of Vaxtang is usually credited to a certain Juanšer Juanšeriani, although there are sound reasons to reject this attribution. Pseudo‐Juanšer treats the period from the reign of Vaxtang’s son and successor Dacˇʻi (r. 522–534) through that of St. Arcˇʻil (r. 736–786), the Chosroid prince of Kaxetʻi/Kakheti. Often lacking the Iranic disposition of The Life of the Kings and The Life of Vaxtang, this text engages the transition from late antiquity to the medieval age, including the final war waged by the Sasanians and Romans, Muḥammad and the ascendancy of Islam, and the ruin of the Sasanian Empire. The royalist writer reports the suppression of the Kʻartʻvelian monarchy by the Sasanians around 580 and covers the initial phase of the interregnum, which stretched to the late ninth century.
Like the vitae produced in late antique Georgia, historiographical works celebrating the monarchy situate the Kʻartʻvelian and larger Caucasian experience principally within an Iranian – and not Romano‐Byzantine – matrix. This said, Pseudo‐Juanšer displays a relatively greater knowledge of Byzantium. When previous Georgian historiography evokes the Roman Empire, references tend to be short, vague, and devoid of historical veracity. Sometimes they have been manipulated so as to nudge the Kʻartʻvelians onto the center stage of Afro‐Eurasian history. Accordingly, The Life of the Kings casts Constantine’s conversion as a desperate reaction to an Irano‐Kʻartʻvelian invasion, and The Life of Vaxtang reports Vaxtang’s successful assault on Roman Anatolia (Qauxcˇʻišvili 1955, pp. 69–70). Once again, the political and cultural framework deployed by early Kʻartʻvelian historians was the Iranian and not the Romano‐Byzantine world.
Hambavi mepʻetʻa’s influence extends to the succinct historiographical components of another literary corpus called Mokʻcʻevay kʻartʻlisay, literally “The Conversion of Kʻartʻli.” This compendium features its namesake seventh‐century text and the longer Life of Nino, composed in the ninth/tenth century. Four short historiographical accounts, often no more than king lists, supply rudimentary background. The Primary History of Kʻartʻli and the three Royal Lists show signs of having drawn upon the late antique Hambavi mepʻetʻa. But in these cases, Hambavi mepʻetʻa was handled not as a model to be emulated but as a storehouse of information. Thus, Mokʻcʻevay kʻartʻlisay’s four brief narratives mostly lack Iranic trappings and explicit acknowledgments of Caucasia’s Iranian orientation. However, not all such imagery was curbed. Sometimes the Iranian and Iranic names of the early kings of Kʻartʻli are more accurately preserved in the historiographical components of Mokʻcʻevay kʻartʻlisay than they are in the densely Iranic Life of the Kings and Life of Vaxtang. Common indebtedness to the Hambavi mepʻetʻa tradition accounts for the similarities of The Life of the Kings and The Life of Vaxtang, on the one hand, and The Primary History and three Royal Lists, on the other. But differences, including divergent traditions about the first king of Kʻartʻli in the early Hellenistic period, also imply Hambavi mepʻetʻa’s existence in more than one recension and simultaneous rendition in oral and written forms.
In their received states, vestiges of the lost Hambavi mepʻetʻa are thus transmitted through several filters. As a cohesive text, Hambavi mepʻetʻa fell from favor in the eighth and ninth centuries and vanished in the twilight of late antiquity. Notwithstanding its removal from the literary canon, Hambavi mepʻetʻa’s historiographical approach, vocabulary, imagery, and, in some cases, whole passages were absorbed into the ca. 800 The Life of the Kings and The Life of Vaxtang. Then, in the eleventh century, during the heyday of the medieval Bagratids, Archbishop Leonti Mroveli gathered existing Georgian historiographies and assembled what may have been the first iteration of Kʻartʻlis cʻxovreba (Kartlis Tskhovreba), the compendium commonly but inaccurately termed “the Georgian Chronicles.” Mroveli re‐edited existing accounts, homogenizing their narratives and stripping them of overt Iranian, Iranic, and Zoroastrian elements. It was probably Mroveli who discarded the original treatment of Mirian’s reign – which must have been distinguished by a strong Iranic flavor – with one downplaying Mirian’s cultural association with Iran. Further, Mroveli injected several Judaeo‐Christian notices into the pre‐Christian section of The Life of the Kings. Unfortunately, all of the manuscripts from this time are lost. What have reached us are Georgian manuscripts copied at the end of the fifteenth century and thereafter. However, a late thirteenth‐century redaction of an Armenian‐language adaptation of Kʻartʻlis cʻxovreba, called Patmutʻiwn Vracʻ or History of the Georgians, demonstrates the stability of the corpus’s constituent texts throughout the medieval era.
Early Georgian literature exhibits continuities with the past and innovations pointing to the future. Particularly important was the acceptance and promotion of Christianity by the crown, which enabled the unprecedented growth of the religion throughout eastern Georgia and contributed to the displacement of polytheistic faiths, especially local Zoroastrianisms. Clearly, Christianization did not result in the obliteration of Caucasia’s entrenched Iranic culture and opulent Iranian heritage. In many respects, Christianity was grafted onto existing cultural and social structures that belonged foremost to the Iranian world. In instances of blatant incompatibility, including but by no means limited to the religious bases of Kʻartʻvelian royal authority, Christianity trumped Zoroastrianism. But symbols and conventions with stout Zoroastrian backgrounds could be perpetuated. One such example is the “spread wings” motif regularly adorning late antique and early medieval Caucasian crosses (Compareti 2010). All the while, early Georgian hagiographical and historiographical literature communicates a muted knowledge of the Roman Empire and its institutions and luminaries. Kʻartʻli’s traditional orientation toward the Iranian Commonwealth thus remained fundamentally intact through Christianization, beyond the collapse of Sasanian power, and even well into the early medieval epoch, at which time The Life of the Kings and The Life of Vaxtang attained their familiar forms.
Finally, it must be emphasized that the value of early Georgian historiographical literature rests not in its “hard facts” – its literal recollection of what “actually happened” – but in the contemporaneous values, attitudes, and orientations saturating its narratives. Accordingly, texts like The Life of the Kings and The Life of Vaxtang open unique windows into late antiquity and are poignant reminders that a Christian society need not be a fundamentally Romano‐Byzantine one, despite the rhetoric emanating from Constantinople and modern Mediterranean‐privileging scholarship (for the former, see Haldon 2016). Indeed, the experience of Caucasia demonstrates that late antiquity was a cross‐cultural enterprise stretching across not only the Mediterranean but the Black, Caspian, and Red Seas as well.
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CHAPTER SEVEN
Middle Persian (Pahlavi)
Touraj Daryaee
Sometime in the ninth century, several important Zoroastrian priests, Adūrbād ī Ēmēdān, Adūrbād ī Farroxzādān, and Zādspram ī Gošanjām, wrote down the teachings of the Mazdean (Zoroastrian) religion for posterity (Boyce 1968, p. 44). Why did they decide to put to pen the tradition of the preceding sages at this time in the history of the Near East? There are a few possible reasons for such a monumental writing and rewriting of the Zoroastrian tradition in Middle Persian in the ninth and the tenth centuries CE. First, there was the loss of adherents of the Good Religion in the face of Islamic expansion. With the Abbasid Caliphate, the idea of what may be called “Persianate Islam” had taken hold and become a vehicle for the spread of the new religion throughout the Iranian Plateau and Central Asia (Eastern Iranian World) and beyond. It can be argued that by the year 1000 CE, approximately the same time that Christianity became the dominant religion in Europe, Islam had become dominant on the Iranian Plateau and the Iranian World (Daryaee 2015, pp. 111–112). Second, a number of religious movements, a mélange of Iranian and Semitic, had begun, as well as other nativist movements that brought new ideas at odds with the established Zoroastrianism of the Sasanian period (224–651 CE) (Crone 2012). These Zoroastrian priests were living at a turning point in the history of the region and of the Iranian people, and it seems that there was a need to put on paper what had come to pass, to etch in the minds of their coreligionists what had happened in the past as well as rules and regulations, so that they would not be forgotten. There was also a need for a defense not only against the newly dominant religion of Islam and older religions such as Christianity but also against what were deemed heretical religious movements in the eighth and the ninth century CE (Daryaee 2016, pp. 136–137).
Thus, when we refer to Pahlavi literature in late antiquity we are speaking of a body of texts written in Middle Persian from roughly the third century to the eleventh century CE. The Aramaic script in different forms was used to write the Middle Persian texts (Weber 2003a), and writings are found from Egypt to China, be it on papyri, parchment, leather, textile, ostraca, or paper (Weber 1992, 2003b). The earliest remains are Pahlavi writings on rock from the time of the founder of the Sasanian Empire, Ardaxšīr I (224–240 CE) at Naqš‐e Rostam, as well as his coins and those of his father and brother. They are short but loaded in meaning and ideology. The Sasanian king claims that he is the king of kings of the Iranians and that he is born of the seed of the gods. By the time of the second ruler Šāpūr I (240–270 CE), Pahlavi inscriptions become longe
r and a narrative is provided that draws from both the oral and written tradition from the Achaemenid period, in contact with the religious literature of the Iranian world.
Pahlavi inscriptions are mainly from the third and the fourth centuries CE and were commissioned by the kings and by the high priest, Kerdīr. They are formulaic in structure and their compositions resemble Achaemenid inscriptions. Some have suggested that this was part of the oral literary tradition that was prevalent in ancient Persia and used by the writers of the inscriptions and texts (Shayegan 2012; Huyse 1990; Skjærvø 1985). The later Sasanian inscriptions (post fourth century) are rarely royal, are shorter, and are commissioned by individuals or local lords for remembrance, building campaigns, and funerary dedications which are much shorter. The script used for the inscriptions represents the archaic version of the Aramaic script. This may be a continuation of a tradition that was first developed by the Achaemenids for their royal chancery. The characters are written separately from right to left, while the later inscriptions are almost Arabesque‐like and the letters are joined and much more cursive. This is similar to the Book Pahlavi or Middle Persian texts that were written in the late Sasanian and post‐Sasanian period.
The content of the early inscriptions is boastful, and the structure is such that first the king makes sure that it is known that he is a Zoroastrian (Māzdēsn = worshipper of Mazda). His genealogy is given next, and then the territories under his rule. A narrative story often follows, as in the case of Šāpūr’s Naqsh‐e Rostam inscription (Huyse 1999; Back 1978) in which there is a story of the defeat of the Romans and what became of them as a result of their aggression. By the middle of the inscription, the boastful nature of the king and his epic actions is evident. This seeking after heroism is also apparent from a short inscription of Šāpuūr at Hājjīābād, where he tells us that he has shot an arrow that has gone very far and dares anyone else to do the same (MacKenzie 1978). This resembles the tale of the great Iranian archer, Arash, whose feats were remembered and recited in Eastern Iran. Thus we already can see traces of Persian epic on the third‐century inscriptions (Daryaee 2014).
