INTRODUCTION.

I. Notices on Kiracos and on Oukhtanès.

The two Armenian historians whose translation I am publishing today have nothing in common regarding the time in which they lived: the 13th and the 10th centuries. Each of them first treats, from his own point of view, the ancient history of Armenia; the one, from the origin until 286 AD, the date of the accession of Trdat Tiridates; the other, from then until 1165, both according to different sources and a different system, from which numerous variations and even some contradictions result. In his 2nd part, Kiracos, as an eyewitness, recounts the invasions of the Mongols into his homeland; Oukhtanès, after a gap of three centuries between the two sections, details the causes and circumstances of the religious secession of the Iberians or Georgians from the Armenians, in 596 of our era; he does this, not as a witness, but as a reporter of an event for which all the supporting documents, found by him at Tiflis, passed through his hands. He therefore publishes the documents and comments on them in his own way, certainly not favorable to his religious adversaries, but appearing to be supported by authentic data. Even if, out of partisan spirit, he exaggerated the colors, the fact of which he speaks is real, mentioned by other authors, and its consequences still persist.

If I have brought together in the same work two sources so different in period and subject, it is not entirely the effect of chance.

While reading, to verify and enrich the annals of Georgia, the numerous Armenian historians who spoke of this region, I felt respect and affection for these respectable vartabieds learned doctors of theology, contemporaries of the events, for the most part, who, in a series of fourteen centuries, have successively taken up the calame reed pen to retrace the history of their homeland. If one excepts those who, like Moses of Khoren, approached high antiquity without sufficiently certain materials, or, like Agathangelos and Faustus of Byzantium, treated the events of their epoch as legendary writers rather than as witnesses, the great majority, evidently people of good faith, although of little instruction, may have committed frequent and heavy chronological errors, especially when it comes to facts accomplished outside of Armenia—here I have primarily in mind the chronologist Samuel of Ani;—as regards the time in which they themselves lived, they deserve in all respects the greatest confidence, and their uncertainties can boldly be attributed, in most circumstances, to variants introduced by copyists, as for example when Asolik, so exact otherwise, is supposed to speak of facts that occurred after his death. Furthermore, they made use of numerical letters, easy to confuse: the most ordinary of these errors fall on the letters g 3, d 4; e 5, z 7; i 20, kh 40; zh 10, ts 50; confusions very easy to make and transcribed without reflection.

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