Two Armenian Historians: Kirakos of Gandzak and Ukhtanes of Edessa

XI
INTRODUCTION.

Armenian, a fact as certain as it is inexplicable in the circumstances with which the narrative is accompanied in Armenian authors, and which one does not know how to reconcile with the Georgian Annals. In the last quarter of the 6th century, at the moment when, according to these annals, the Georgians had just given themselves a king, in the person of Gouram, a Bagratid ¹), and when they had a Catholicos by the name of Samouel, at that time, according to Oukhtanès, a so-called Georgian Catholicos dies, whom he does not name, and the Armenian Catholicos Moses I replaces him with a certain Kyron, a native of Skutri, in the Javakheti, who soon turns toward Greek orthodoxy regarding the doctrines of the Council of Chalcedon and, with the entire nation subject to his jurisdiction, renounces the Armenian communion forever. Of the king, not a single word is said, although the author recognizes Tiflis as a "royal city," the capital of Iberia. Of the great men of the country, he names a few, but neither Gourgen, nor Vakhtang, nor Juansher, who were at that time striking those bilingual Pahlavi-Georgian coins well known in numismatics since the work of General Bartholomaei and M. Langlois, and who appear to be among those lords to whom the Sassanid King Hormizd IV had conferred a sort of independence under his suzerainty. Of which Georgia, then, does Oukhtanès speak? Of the true Georgia, which had its king and its Catholicos, if the Annals are true; or indeed of a portion of the country where a large number of Armenians resided, having, as they had later, their arhadchnord spiritual superior? In the second case, Kyron was not a true Catholicos but a simple arhadchnord; in the first, why remain silent about King Gouram and Samouel? For, after all, such a change of rite could not be accomplished without the leaders of the nation having taken some part in it. I will say no more on this subject, because I have nothing to add to what I wrote 20 years ago, in 1851, in my Addition V. Despite the boredom one experiences in reading these accounts of theological quarrels, it is here that our Oukhtanès becomes truly interesting, through his way of treating and exposing the origin of the nationality of the Iberians, the political state of their country in the 6th century of our era, the ethnology of the various tribes that occupy it, and a crowd of questions pertaining to the religious history of the two regions. His repetitions, his digressions, his analysis of documents are excessively tiring; his hatred against the Council of Chalcedon is truly fanatical, but the whole is original to the highest degree. I believe that it is, in all of Oriental literature, the only point of history exclusively treated by an Asiatic according to justifying documents alleged in their entirety.

Finally, the 3rd Part was to be devoted to the history of an Armenian tribe, that of the Dzad, which is barely known, but it has disappeared from the Etchmiadzin manuscript and consequently from the copy in the Asiatic Museum. If, as is very probable, the Dzad are

1. It is known that Armenian authors do not agree with the Georgian Annals on the origin of the Bagratid dynasty of Iberia, and they flatly make it descend from an Armenian Bagratid, Vasak, living toward the middle of the 8th century, brother of Bagrat, to whom the genealogy of the Bagratid kings of Armenia surely traces back; cf. Add. IX, p. 161. As for Gouram, the Armenian summary of the Annals, ibid. p. 49, does not qualify him as a Bagratid.