OT: Artashes and Satenik

[artavazd]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satenik

[Aemilius Paulus]

...

And?

[Julius Augustus]

So why did you post this thread?

[Urg]

That looks like an amazing story (even to someone like me who usually prefers Roman stuff).

I bet the complete version contains some very cool quotes for the EB loading screens.

[The Persian Cataphract]

I'm surprised that the second and third posts fail to see the worth of this apocryphal, yet highly romanticistic tale recounting the old Artaxiad genealogy by Movses Khorenatsi (An early medieval Armenian author); it speaks volumes about a great literary tradition which shares several qualities with the "love-stories" in the Shahnameh.

Another important tidbit of this story is again the quintessential Iranian link to the hegemony. The Orontids claimed their ancestry from the Achaemenid satrapal nobility of Bactria, and the Arsacids of Armenia were directly a result of co-marriage of the Artaxiad and Arsacid houses when Pacorus took the sister of Artavasdes II as part of a treaty. When the Arsacid interlude in Armenia was supplanted by the largely Sassanian-sponsored "Marzpans" (Giving the era its name), Armenia had boasted no less than three dynasties which would have had that essential Iranian royal culture.

However, the irony is that once the Armenian Arsacid cadet royals institutionalized Christianity on a national level, by the time of the Marzpanate era, that link would gradually distance itself from its Iranian role-model, and become more distinctly Armenian; hence we get a native Armenian script, and a strong concentration of Armenian literati (About twenty different authors. This is not at all a shabby figure!) starting from the very end of antiquity. By the time of Agathangelos recension of the Arsacid Armenian romance of Artabanes and Artasiras, this link was portrayed very strongly (Though with the same revised anachronisms introduced in Medieval Armenian literati recounting the "days of old").

The literary topoi of contemporary Armenian revisionism is by itself very comparable to the Sassanian model of basically ruling out the Arsacids and hoarding the historical accolades for their own purposes. Sometimes because there are severe patches in the genealogy which need to be filled in with sometimes fantastical stories... And sometimes intentional if something or someone needed the legitimacy. These books were usually not compiled for the commoners (As the oral tradition was usually stronger there), but rather as written edicts for certain personalities. The most famous example of this is perhaps the service of Ferdowsi, the famous Iranian national bard, between the courts of the Samanids and Ghaznavids. Another famous example is the semi-mythical account of Ardashir, (Karnamag of Ardashir) the Sassanian dynast, compiled as a Medieval Zoroastrian legend.

What makes the writings of Movses Khorenatsi so important is the provision of the Armenian perspective of its own royal lineage, providing, even if sometimes apocryphal, a much needed contrast to brief Graeco-Roman narrations.