The Caucasian Iberians

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At the height of summer, when the great feast of the god was kept, the people of the plain climbed to the mountain that faces Mtskheta across the water. On the acropolis above them stood their king of the gods, cast in bronze and clothed in a golden coat of chain mail, a strong helmet on his head and two green stones, emerald and beryl, set for his eyes. In his hand he held a sabre that flashed like lightning, and the tradition insists it turned in his grip at the festival, as if the weapon were forever half-drawn. This was Armazi, and the citadel he crowned was Armaztsikhe, “the fortress of Armazi,” named for him. The people who raised him were the Iberians — not the Iberians of Spain, who never knew this god, but the Kartvelians of the eastern Georgian plain, whose kingdom the Greek and Roman geographers, reaching for a word, happened to call by the same name.

The kingdom the Greeks called Iberia

The first thing to fix is the name, because it has misled readers for two thousand years. There were two Iberias in the classical world, and they had nothing to do with each other. One was the peninsula in the far west, Spain and Portugal, home to the peoples the Romans fought in the Punic and Sertorian wars. The other lay at the opposite edge of the known earth, between the Black Sea and the Caspian, in the valleys of the central Caucasus: the kingdom of Kartli, in what is now eastern Georgia. As the article Kingdom of Iberia puts it plainly, “in Greco-Roman geography, Iberia was an exonym for the Georgian kingdom of Kartli.” The two lands share a Greek word and nothing else — no descent, no migration, no kinship of language or blood. The Caucasian Iberians are the subject here, and every sentence that follows concerns the eastern kingdom alone. It had a western neighbor of its own, and the two should not be confused either: bordering Iberia toward the Black Sea lay the older kingdom of Colchis, the land of the Colchians with their famous gold — a separate Caucasian people and realm, so that the Georgian world of antiquity held two distinct kingdoms, Colchis in the west and Kartli-Iberia in the east.

This kingdom reaches the written record along two channels that rarely touch. The first is the Georgian national tradition, preserved in the medieval compendium known as Kartlis Tskhovreba, “The Life of Kartli” — the Georgian Chronicles — whose oldest stratum, the Lives of the Georgian Kings ascribed to the eleventh-century cleric Leonti Mroveli, narrates the founding of the monarchy. It tells of Pharnavaz, a young man remembered as the nephew of Samara, the mamasakhlisi or patriarch of the community at Mtskheta. In the confusion left by Alexander’s conquests, so the story runs, a ruler named Azo (Azon) held Kartli for the Macedonians; Pharnavaz rose against him, defeated and killed him, and made himself the first king of Kartli around 302 BCE, founder of the Pharnavazid line. He is said to have acknowledged the overlordship of the Seleucids, the Greek kings who inherited the Iranian east from Alexander. How long he reigned no one can say with confidence: Vakhushti dated him 302 to 237 BCE, Cyril Toumanoff 299 to 234, Pavle Ingoroqva 284 to 219, and the whole Macedonian episode, along with the tradition that Pharnavaz invented the Georgian alphabet, is treated by modern scholars as later legend grown up around a founder’s name. What the Chronicles remember with more authority is administration: they credit Pharnavaz with dividing Iberia into a set of provinces, seven by the usual count, each under a governor called an eristavi, on a frankly Persian model of rule.

The second channel is the classical geographers, and above all Strabo, who in Book XI of his Geography, written in the early first century CE, describes the Iberians of the Caucasus at first hand of report. His Iberians are not a scatter of hill tribes. They are a settled people who farm the fertile plain of the Kura — the river the Georgians call the Mtkvari — and live in cities with tiled roofs, marketplaces and public buildings laid out with architectural care. Their capital was Mtskheta, set where the Aragvi comes down out of the mountains to join the Mtkvari, and their royal acropolis was Armaztsikhe, the fortress on Mount Bagineti, a fortified spread of some thirty hectares on the river’s right bank.

Behind both channels stands the archaeology, which gives the tradition a material spine it would otherwise lack. Excavation at Armaztsikhe-Bagineti, carried on since the 1940s, has separated three cultural layers on the acropolis. The oldest, Armazi I, of the fourth to third centuries BCE, is built of massive stone blocks finished in mud brick and includes a great hall of six columns under a tiled roof — the architecture of the kingdom’s first age, contemporary with the founder the Chronicles name. Armazi II, of the third to first centuries BCE, is marked by a temple with an apse. Armazi III, the richest layer, of the first to sixth centuries CE, is cut from elegant dressed stone joined with mortar and metal clamps, and yields a royal palace, a bathhouse, a stone mausoleum and richly furnished tombs. The spade, in other words, confirms the outline the texts preserve: a city-dwelling monarchy, seated at the meeting of two rivers, that endured for the better part of a thousand years.

The meeting of the Aragvi and the Mtkvari at Mtskheta, the capital of Kartli; the acropolis of Armaztsikhe stood on the mountain above the far bank. Margot Kask, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Four classes and an armored god

Strabo’s most valuable page on the Iberians is his account of how their society was ranged, and it is worth giving in his own words. The population, he wrote, fell into four hereditary orders. The passage, in the Loeb translation, runs: “One, and the first of all, is that from which they appoint their kings, the appointee being both the nearest of kin to his predecessor and the eldest … The second caste is that of the priests, who among other things attend to all matters of controversy with the neighbouring peoples. The third is that of the soldiers and the farmers. And the fourth is that of the common people, who are slaves of the king and perform all the services that pertain to human livelihood.” The kingship, then, was drawn from a royal kin-group by seniority; the second man in that first order administered justice and led the army. Below the royal caste stood a distinct estate of priests, and the detail Strabo gives them is telling — they did not merely tend the altars but conducted the kingdom’s dealings with its neighbors, a sacerdotal diplomacy that made the priesthood an organ of the state. Beneath them came the soldier-farmers who both worked the land and bore arms, and beneath all a common people bound to the crown. It is a four-tiered order with the sacred estate set high, and it maps with striking neatness onto the god the same people raised.

For the god at the summit of this world was himself a sovereign. Within the tradition Armazi is the lord of the sky, of thunder and rain, of the growing plants and of war — a supreme deity, styled in the Georgian sources “god of gods, the great god,” the one “who caused the fruits of the earth to grow.” Ranged below him stood lesser powers: Zaden, a god of fertility reckoned nearly his equal, and the paired idols Gatsi and Gaim, a gold god and a silver, that flanked the great image on the acropolis. The king was bound to Armazi as to no other. Pharnavaz, who is said to have raised the idol in the late third century BCE and given his own dynasty its cult, was remembered as buried before it and honored there after death; the sovereignty of the throne and the sovereignty of the god were a single thing, and the fortress carried the god’s name as the kingdom carried the king’s. The oldest surviving description of the image, in the ninth- or tenth-century Life of Nino, renders it with the exactness of an eyewitness to a hierophany — “a man of bronze standing; attached to his body was a golden suit of chain armor, on his head a strong helmet; for eyes he had emeralds and beryls, in his hands he held a sabre glittering like lightning, and it turned in his hands.” This is a warrior first and a king first: no god of the hearth or the harvest-basket, but the armed sovereign of sky and battle, the divine double of the mailed king who set him up.

What Armazi was in origin is the deep and honest question of the tradition, and the sources hold it open rather than force it shut. One reading looks south, to Iran. The name Armazi is widely derived from the Middle Persian Ohrmazd, itself the later form of Avestan Ahura Mazda, the supreme lord of Zoroastrianism — the Armenians worshiped the same figure as Aramazd. The match is more than a matter of syllables: the Iberian kingdom lay for centuries inside the religious gravity of the Iranian world, fire-cult installations have been found in ancient Georgian soil, and a Persian high god reworked into a Kartvelian warrior-sovereign is exactly the kind of import that world produced. The Encyclopaedia Iranica treats Armazi under just this heading. The other reading looks west, into Anatolia. The Georgian historians Giorgi Melikishvili and Ivane Javakhishvili argued that behind Armazi stands not Ahura Mazda but Arma, the moon-god of the Hittites and Luwians — a crescent-crowned deity of the lunar cycle and of oaths, whose old cult, they held, later flowed into the immense Georgian veneration of Saint George. Donald Rayfield, in his critical history of Georgia, has pressed a version of this Anatolian line. Many scholars decline to choose, and read the god as genuinely composite, an Iranian layer and a Caucasian-Anatolian layer fused in one crowned figure. The matter is not settled and cannot honestly be presented as though it were. But either way the teaching is coherent: a warrior sky-lord at the head of a four-class society, his priesthood a separate estate, his cult the guarantor of kingship and harvest and victory at once. On the god himself, treated as the state cult he was, the entry Armazi carries the fuller account.

The kingdom left a further record in its own hand. Among the finds at Armaztsikhe is a bilingual tombstone, the Stele of Serapeitis, inscribed in Greek and in a distinctive local development of the Aramaic script that scholars have named “Armazian” — the writing used by the royal officials of Iberia before the Georgian alphabet came into being. It is a small monument with a large meaning: a settled literate court, bilingual in the languages of empire, keeping its dead and its business in stone. The society Strabo described from report is, in objects like these, recovered in fact.

The Stele of Serapeitis: a Greek and ‘Armazian’-Aramaic bilingual tombstone from the acropolis, witness to the literate court of Caucasian Iberia. Via the Ilia State University epigraphy database, Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain Mark 1.0.

The turn, and the long unmaking

The Iberian sacred order was not so much abolished as overturned and absorbed, and the tradition remembers the moment with an almost dramatic precision. In the early fourth century, the Life of Nino relates, a Cappadocian woman named Nino came into Kartli and healed first Queen Nana of a grave sickness and then, when he was overtaken by a sudden darkness while hunting, King Mirian III himself. Won to Christ, Mirian made Christianity the religion of the kingdom, which thereby became the second state in the world, after Armenia, to adopt the faith. The date is one of the genuinely contested points of the record. The Georgian Orthodox Church keeps 326 CE as the conventional year — the seventeenth centenary falls in 2026 — while the figure of 337, long accepted in the older literature, is now widely doubted, and historians have proposed dates ranging across the 310s, 320s and 330s, with 319 and 326 the most favored. The exactness is lost; the turn itself is not.

The Christianization of Iberia has, at its heart, the fall of Armazi, and the Life of Nino stages it as a founding miracle. As the great summer feast of the idol was being kept on the acropolis, with the king and the whole city assembled, a storm broke over Armaztsikhe — hail in stones, a tearing wind — and the bronze warrior was beaten to fragments where he stood, cast down among the rocks with the gold and silver gods beside him. Mirian, the tradition continues, ordered the images and the fire-temples of Kartli thrown down. This scene must be read for what it is: hagiography and theology, the Christian tradition’s account of its own beginning, not a weather report to be dated. To render it soberly is neither to endorse its verdict on the old god nor to dismiss him. Within his own world Armazi truly was the armored sovereign of the acropolis; the chronicle that records his shattering is telling us how the memory of that world was reorganized around a new center. And there is a real irony in it, for the fullest surviving portrait of the god — the mail, the helmet, the jeweled eyes, the turning sabre — comes to us only because the Christian writers set it down in order to record its overthrow.

The old layer did not vanish so much as migrate. The moon-god some scholars find inside Armazi is thought by Javakhishvili and others to have flowed, after the conversion, into the Georgian cult of Saint George — into Tetri Giorgi, “White George,” whose whiteness carries the moon — and the ancient mountain powers went on living in the highland shrine religion of the Khevsur, the Pshav and the Svan, who remain a living people; that long survival belongs to their own account, and is treated with the Svans. What concerns the Iberian kingdom is that its sacred order was overturned at the summit while older currents ran on beneath.

The place itself passed through the whole arc of the kingdom’s fortunes, and its stones keep the dates. In 65 BCE the legions of Pompey stormed Armaztsikhe, campaigning against the Iberian king; in 75 CE the emperor Vespasian refortified the citadel for King Mithridates I, a ruler styled “friend of the Caesars,” and the inscription recording the work survives. The Pharnavazid house did not hold the throne unbroken: a branch of the Armenian Artaxiads displaced it around the 90s BCE, and after them came Arsacid and then Chosroid rulers, the last recognized by Rome near the close of the third century. Through the same centuries the kingdom was drawn ever deeper into the orbit of the resurgent Sasanian Persia, until in 580 CE the Sasanian king Hormizd IV abolished the monarchy outright on the death of its last king and turned Iberia into a Persian province under a governor, a marzpan. The acropolis outlived even that: it was finally razed by the Arab commander Marwan ibn Muhammad around 736 CE, in the campaign the Georgians remember as the work of “Marwan the Deaf.” And then, in the twelfth century, on the very ground the idol had held, a monastery rose to Saint Nino — the saint the tradition credits with his fall — so that the last building on the acropolis of Armazi bears the name of the woman who, in the telling, prayed his storm down. The Caucasian Iberians ended as a documented people and became the Georgians, whose kingdom this had been; but the bronze king on the mountain, contested to this day between Persia and Anatolia, is still being carried up out of the earth that buried him.

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