Armaztsikhe (Bagineti)

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Where the Aragvi comes down out of the highlands and empties into the wide Mtkvari, the land pinches to a gate. On the right bank a hill lifts over the meeting of the waters — Mount Bagineti — and whoever held its summit held the road into the heart of eastern Georgia. In 65 BC the soldiers of the Roman general Pompey fought their way up that hill against the king of the country; the classical writers, reaching for a word their readers would understand, called what they took the acropolis of Iberia. But a general was not the first power to claim the height. The tradition of the Georgians sets on the same summit, centuries before the legions, the idol of a god — Armazi, the armored king of their pantheon — so that the fortress and the shrine were one thing, and the stronghold a general would seize and the seat a god would occupy were the identical stone above the identical river-junction. The place is called Armaztsikhe: the citadel of Armazi.

The citadel and how it reaches the record

The name divides cleanly. Tsikhe is the Georgian word for a fortress or walled citadel; Armaz- is the god. Armaztsikhe is “the fortress of Armazi,” and the modern archaeological label — Armaztsikhe-Bagineti — pins that fortress to the particular hill it stands on, Mount Bagineti, on the right bank of the Mtkvari (the river the Greeks and Romans called the Kura) at its confluence with the Aragvi. The site lies some four kilometers southwest of Mtskheta and about twenty-two kilometers northwest of Tbilisi, close enough to the old capital that it functioned as its acropolis, its high fortified crown, for the better part of a thousand years.

That capital, Mtskheta, was the seat of Kartli, the kingdom of the eastern Georgian plain that the classical geographers — Strabo above all — called Iberia. The name has misled readers for as long as it has been written down, and it is worth stopping on. This Iberia, the land of the Caucasian Iberians between the Black and Caspian seas, has nothing whatever to do with the Iberia of the Spanish peninsula and its own quite separate Iberians. The two share only a Greek exonym, one word reached for twice at opposite ends of the ancient world, and the coincidence binds nothing behind the names. Armaztsikhe belongs wholly to the eastern one — to the Kartvelian world of Mtskheta, the Mtkvari, and the Aragvi, and to the god who gave the hill his name.

The genealogy of the place, as the Georgians themselves preserved it, is inseparable from that god. The medieval Georgian chronicles gathered under the title Kartlis Tskhovreba, the “Life of Kartli,” credit the semi-legendary Pharnavaz I — remembered as the first king of Kartli, his reign traditionally set in the third century BC — with founding the citadel above his new capital and raising there the idol of Armazi, whom he proclaimed the chief god of the kingdom. This account has to be read as tradition rather than as plain reportage. Its earliest manuscripts are far younger than the events they describe, and their purpose is dynastic: to bind the founding god to the founding king and give the state a single origin. The idol and its powers belong to that tradition-internal register, and the encyclopedia carries them under the god’s own name, Armazi; the debated question of whether the god was an Iranian reflex of Ahura Mazda or an older Anatolian moon-god named Arma is likewise a matter for the god’s entry, where it can be weighed as the genuinely contested thing it is. What concerns the site is the stone seat itself.

And the antiquity of that seat does not rest on the chronicles alone. The classical record confirms the citadel independently: Roman and later geographers name it — as Harmozica, or Armastica — the fortress commanding the Iberian capital, and the spade has reached, beneath the Hellenistic and Roman city, horizons that touch the Achaemenid-era world of Persian Anatolia and the Caucasus. The Encyclopaedia Iranica, treating the place under the heading “Armazi (or Armaz-tsikhe)”, describes exactly this: an important royal city of Iberia, its cult and its kingship set within the long gravitational pull of Iran. The tradition claims a founding king; the earth confirms a very old fortress; the two need not be made to say precisely the same thing for both to be true in their own register.

The idol’s seat, dug back into daylight

Within the sacred geography of pre-Christian Kartli, Armaztsikhe was the single point at which three things were fused — the kingship, the capital, and the supreme god. It commanded the gorge where the Aragvi pours into the Mtkvari, the natural doorway into the interior of the kingdom, and it did so as fortress and sanctuary at once. Excavation has laid bare that fusion with unusual clarity. Digging on the hill has uncovered the base of the Armazi idol itself; a six-apse temple of the first century AD; the foundation walls of a palatial building; a bath-house served by a canal system and stone plumbing; decorated tombs and a royal sarcophagus; and, girdling the summit and the slope that runs down to the water, adobe walls and towers raised on a plinth of hewn stone in the first half of the first century AD, enclosing an area of roughly thirty hectares. It is the physical signature of a place that was residence, stronghold, and state shrine together.

Among the most eloquent finds is the least monumental: a wine-cellar, attached to the complex at a later stage, in which archaeologists recovered the buried qvevri — the great clay fermentation-vessels sunk into the earth that are still, in living Georgian practice, the heart of the country’s winemaking. The total capacity of the vessels unearthed there runs to something on the order of twenty thousand liters. It is a domestic detail with an outsized meaning: the citadel was not merely a wall and an idol but a working royal household, storing wine and grain against the year, and the technology of the buried jar reaches unbroken from the Iberian kings to the Georgian cellars of the present.

It is instructive to set the eastern citadel beside its western counterpart. Far across the mountains, in what had been the kingdom of Colchis on the Black Sea, Georgian archaeologists have recovered the great sanctuary of Vani, a place of gold-work and offering rather than of kingship and wall. The two sites frame the ancient Georgian world between them: Vani the Colchian shrine of the goldsmiths in the west, Armaztsikhe the royal fortress-shrine of the Iberian kings in the east, each dug back into daylight by the same modern national scholarship. Where Vani speaks of a religion of wealth and the dead, Bagineti speaks of a religion bound to the throne — the god who guarded the capital from the height that also guarded the road.

The archaeology reads the hill as three superimposed cultures, and Georgian scholarship numbers them. Armazi I, of the fourth to third centuries BC, is the oldest layer, with a massive base of stone blocks and a great hall built on six columns — the deepest architecture of the state sanctuary. Armazi II, of the third to first centuries BC, is marked by a temple built with an apse. Armazi III, of the first to sixth centuries AD, is the finest masonry of all: elegantly cut blocks joined with lime mortar and clamped with metal, the work of a mature and wealthy court. The strata do not merely date the site; they show a place continuously important across seven or eight centuries, rebuilt and enriched again and again on the same commanding ground.

From the neighboring necropolis of Armaziskhevi came the site’s most articulate voice. In 1940, excavators there brought up a stone funerary stele carrying a bilingual inscription, dated to about the middle of the second century AD — the monument known as the Armazi bilingual, or the Stele of Serapeitis. Its two texts, one in Greek and one in a local script, commemorate a young woman named Serapeitis, and the details they give open a window straight into the Iberian court. She was the daughter of the pitiaxsh — the viceroy or grand vizier — Zevakh, and the wife of Iodmanganos, who served as master of the court of the Iberian king Xepharnougos; the accompanying Aramaic text names the reigning house against the earlier king Pharasmanes. She is praised, in words the inscription itself supplies, as so fine and beautiful that none was her equal, and she is mourned as dead in her twenty-first year. A viceroy’s daughter, a court-master’s wife, dead at twenty-one, and grand enough to be buried under a bilingual stone: the epitaph is a shaft of light on a literate, hierarchical, cosmopolitan society that the walls alone could never have described.

The script of that second text is itself a document. It is not standard imperial Aramaic but a distinctive local cursive that scholars call Armazic — an Iberian adaptation of the Aramaic alphabet, developed for the use of the Kartlian court and found on other inscriptions from the same milieu. Aramaic had long served as the administrative lingua franca of the Persian world, and its survival and local reshaping at Mtskheta is the mark of a kingdom that read and wrote across the languages of its neighbors. Here the registers must be kept apart with some care. The idol of Armazi and the powers ascribed to him belong to the tradition the chronicles preserve; the walls, the wine-jars, the six-apse temple, the pitiaxsh and his daughter’s stele are the documented record of archaeology and epigraphy — the two overlapping on the same hill without collapsing into each other. One is what the Iberians believed; the other is what the earth and the inscribed stone have actually yielded.

The excavated ruins of Armaztsikhe-Bagineti, the fortress-acropolis of ancient Mtskheta on Mount Bagineti above the meeting of the Mtkvari and Aragvi rivers. Aleksey Muhranoff, 2010, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Capture, conversion, and the long recovery

The afterlife of the citadel is a chronicle of capture and, at the last, of transformation. The first great rupture came with Rome. In 65 BC, campaigning eastward against the Iberian king — named in the sources as Artag, or Artoces — Pompey took the acropolis on Mount Bagineti; it was the first time the height fell to an outside power, and it would not be the last. But the taking did not end the place. The citadel was rebuilt and went on as a royal city, its finest masonry, the Armazi III layer, belonging to the centuries after the Roman shock rather than before it. The fortress absorbed its conquerors and continued.

The decisive turn was not military but religious, and it came in the fourth century AD. When Christianity was proclaimed the state religion of Kartli — the scholarly consensus places the conversion of King Mirian III, under the preaching of the woman remembered as Saint Nino, at around 337 — the cult of Armazi came to its end, and in the hagiographic tradition the idol on the acropolis was shattered. That scene, the storm that answers the saint’s prayer and throws down the bronze king above Mtskheta, is the founding memory of a nation that has been Orthodox Christian ever since, and it is told at length where it properly belongs, in the entry on the god Armazi himself; for the site, it is enough to mark it soberly as the moment the shrine ceased to be a shrine. The old sanctuary did not fall to an enemy. Its own kingdom turned, and the cult that had crowned the hill for six centuries simply stopped, leaving the walls to a new age.

The walls themselves outlasted the cult by four hundred years and then met a harder end. In 736 AD the city was destroyed and razed by the Umayyad commander Marwan ibn Muhammad — the future caliph Marwan II, remembered in Georgian tradition as Murvan Kru, “Marwan the Deaf,” for the merciless deafness of his campaign through the Caucasus. After that the royal city on Bagineti was finished as a living place, and the hill went quiet for more than a millennium.

Its return is the work of modern Georgian archaeology. After minor digging around 1890, large-scale, systematic excavation was directed from 1943 to 1948 by Andria Apakidze of the Georgian Academy of Sciences, and it was Apakidze’s campaigns that recovered the palace, the bath-house, the temple, and the stratigraphy of the three Armazi cultures; work was resumed from 1985 and continues. The Armazi bilingual, meanwhile, had already become a cornerstone of two scholarly fields. Its Greek text was read by the Georgian scholars S. Kaukhchishvili and A. Shanidze in 1941, and its Aramaic — the Armazic — by G. Tsereteli in 1941 and 1942; between them they opened not only the biography of Serapeitis but a whole corpus of Iberian court epigraphy, and the stele has been quarried by Georgian and Iranological scholarship ever since for what it reveals of a kingdom poised between Rome and Iran. Today Armaztsikhe-Bagineti lies within the UNESCO World Heritage ensemble of the Historical Monuments of Mtskheta, an open archaeological reserve on the hill above the river-junction, its foundations and its idol-base laid out to the weather and the visitor.

The open-air museum at Armaztsikhe-Bagineti, part of the UNESCO Historical Monuments of Mtskheta, preserving the foundations of the royal city of Caucasian Iberia. Kober, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Set the whole record on the hill at once and it composes a single, layered thing. The gorge is still a gate; the Aragvi still empties into the Mtkvari beneath the summit; and on the summit lie, in order, the six-columned base of the earliest sanctuary, the apsed temple of the middle centuries, the clamped ashlar of the Roman-era city, and the empty socket where the tradition says the idol stood before the fourth century took it down. Pompey’s legions and the god of the acropolis wanted the same height for the same reason — it commanded everything below — and the archaeologists who followed them up the hill were, in the end, after that reason too. What Apakidze’s spade recovered is not a lost religion returned to use but the shape of a place where a kingdom kept its king, its wine, its dead, and its god in one walled crown over the water, and held them there until, one century at a time, the water outlasted the walls.

→ Related: Armazi · The Iberians Caucasus · The Colchians · The Svans · Vani Sanctuary · The Lashari Shrine · Khakhmati · Ghmerti · Dali · Ochopintre · Kopala · Colchis · Medea