The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes

Caucasia and the Iranian Commonwealth in Late Antique Georgian Literature

Stephen H. Rapp Jr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317016717
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia antica

Georgian literary sources for Late Antiquity are commonly held to be later productions devoid of historical value. As a result, scholarship outside the Republic of Georgia has privileged Graeco-Roman and even Armenian narratives. However, when investigated within the dual contexts of a regional literary canon and the active participation of Caucasia's diverse peoples in the Iranian Commonwealth, early Georgian texts emerge as a rich repository of late antique attitudes and outlooks. Georgian hagiographical and historiographical compositions open a unique window onto a northern part of the Sasanian world that, while sharing striking affinities with the Iranian heartland, was home to vibrant, cosmopolitan cultures that developed along their own trajectories. In these sources, precise and accurate information about the core of the Sasanian Empire-and before it, Parthia and Achaemenid Persia-is sparse; yet the thorough structuring of wider Caucasian society along Iranian and especially hybrid Iranic lines is altogether evident. Scrutiny of these texts reveals, inter alia, that the Old Georgian language is saturated with words drawn from Parthian and Middle Persian, a trait shared with Classical Armenian; that Caucasian society, like its Iranian counterpart, was dominated by powerful aristocratic houses, many of whose origins can be traced to Iran itself; and that the conception of kingship in the eastern Georgian realm of K'art'li (Iberia), even centuries after the royal family's Christianisation in the 320s and 330s, was closely aligned with Arsacid and especially Sasanian models. There is also a literary dimension to the Irano-Caucasian nexus, aspects of which this volume exposes for the first time. The oldest surviving specimens of Georgian historiography exhibit intriguing parallels to the lost Sasanian Xwad?y-n?mag, The Book of Kings, one of the precursors to Ferdowsī's Sh?hn?ma. As tangible products of the dense cross-cultural web drawing the re

PART I
Hagiographical Texts

Chapter 1
The Vitae of Ŝuŝanik and Evstat‘i

The Dawn of Georgian Literature

Serious scholarship has long abandoned “all or nothing” models in which Paul of Tarsos’ conversion on the road to Damascus – the story of sudden and total transformation – is applied to whole communities and peoples. Social conversion is, in fact, a dynamic, long-term process often transcending conventional cultural, political and economic boundaries.¹ Conversion necessarily entails change, but change is rarely a one-way street: both the receptors and the faith are altered, though rarely equally. At one end of the spectrum, a group embraces or is coerced to accept new ideas and practices that replace older ones or that remedy an inadequacy, real or perceived. At the other end, the religion, which itself may be heterogeneous, is adapted to the social matrix of the host. Conversion thus involves considerable give and take. While observers are frequently drawn to dramatic introductions of the new and innovative, it is the middle ground² – the site of vigorous cross-cultural adaptation, synthesis and syncretism – that tends to be the best predictor of success and longevity. The middle ground is one of the dynamos driving regional, Eurasian and even world and global history.³ Within Eurasia, the Caucasian crossroads was an especially energetic middle ground throughout pre-modern times.

Talk of conversion elicits religion, and religion is central to any examination of late antique Caucasia. This is particularly true for Christianity, whose various sects and confessions predominated in southern Caucasia for all but the first century of the Sasanian regime. But Christianity had made earlier inroads. When the faith began to penetrate Caucasia in the second century, the region’s diverse but interconnected peoples already possessed sophisticated religious ideas, rich cultural traditions and ancient cosmopolitan histories.⁴ As the Parthian Arsacids consolidated their control over the fractured Near East and as the Roman Republic and then Empire attempted to cast its hegemony over the Black Sea world, indigenous kingdoms already thrived in Armenia Major, eastern Georgia and Caucasian Albania. Collectively and over the long haul these polities, their hinterlands and the highlands of the Caucasus Mountains constituted a northern theatre where imperial antagonisms frequently deteriorated into open conflict and protracted warfare.⁵ Imperial competition and the potential benefits to be reaped by playing one great power against the other contributed mightily to the Christianisation of Caucasia’s dynastic monarchies in the first half of the fourth century.⁶ This phenomenon went hand-in-hand with the conversion of the Partho-Caucasian aristocratic houses at the heart of Caucasian society, a process about which we know disappointingly little. The conversion of these political élites made overt, regime-supported proselytisation possible.⁷

Caucasia’s conversion to Christianity was a centuries-long, cross-cultural process. The notion of discrete “once-and-forever” ethnocentric conversions having incidental connections, or ones that were strictly ethno-hierarchical, is not borne out by a critical reading of the regional evidence. With impressive speed the new religion and existing local cultures reached a condominium. Not only was the unifying potential of Christianity quickly realised within particular ethnies⁸ – the case of the various Armenians has been investigated by Nicholas Adontz (Adonc‘)⁹ and others – but Christianity also transcended them on a regional scale, as Cyril Toumanoff so expertly revealed.¹⁰

One of the genuinely revolutionary consequences of Caucasia’s royal and aristocratic conversions was the invention of distinctive scripts for the Armenian, Georgian and Albanian languages. Through a multifaceted pan-Caucasian effort at the turn of the fourth/fifth century, alphabetic scripts were devised by Christians with the goal of strengthening and propagating the faith through translated ecclesiastical literature.¹¹ The immediate stimulus was Christianisation. There were other factors, too, including the creation of scripts for several Aramaic languages under the later Parthian Arsacids. Writing systems for Elymaic, Characenean and Mandaic were based upon the Parthian chancery script.¹² Non-clerical groups soon profited from Caucasia’s embryonic literary cultures. Over time the cosmopolitan spirit of early Christian Caucasia was undercut by élites – armed with their own literatures – who gave priority to their particular, mutually-reinforcing political, confessional and cultural-linguistic affiliations. In the long run these were appropriated by modern patriots who enlisted them at the cores of their...