Armazi - History

History

Archaeological evidences testify that the ancient Armazi was far more extensive than it is today. Armazi's strategic situation was dictated by its ready access to the Daryal Pass, the main road over the Greater Caucasus, through which the Scythians invaded the ancient Near East.

The name of the city and its dominant acropolis, Armaz-Tsikhe (literally, "citadel of Armazi"; არმაზციხე), is usually taken to derive from Armazi, the chief deity of the pagan Iberian pantheon. The name first appears in the early medieval Georgian annals though it is clearly much older and reflected in the Classical name Armastica or Harmozica of Strabo, Pliny, Ptolemy and Dio Cassius. According to a collection of medieval Georgian chronicles, Armaztsikhe was founded, in the 3rd century BC, by the semi-legendary king Pharnavaz I of Iberia at the place hitherto known as Kartli. This fortress stood on the modern-day Mount Bagineti, on the right bank of the Mtkvari River (Kura), at its confluence with the Aragvi. The other citadel, Tsitsamuri (წიწამური) or Sevsamora of the Classical authors, stood just opposite, on the left bank of the Aragvi and controlled the road towards Mount Kazbek.

Even after the rise of Mtskheta as a capital of Iberia, Armazi remained the holy city of Iberian paganism and one of the defenses of Mtskheta. The fortress was captured by the Roman general Pompey during his 65 BC campaign against the Iberian king Artag. A ruined structure over the Mtkvari River dates from that time and is still called "Pompey's bridge". Armazi's heyday came when Iberia was allied with the Roman emperors. A stone stele unearthed at Armazi in 1867 reports that the Roman Emperor Vespasian fortified Armazi for the Iberian king Mithridates I in 75 AD. This defense wall constructed in a unique position to block the southern exit of the Daryal Pass before it widens into the plain of modern Tbilisi was presumably a preventive measure against the Alans who frequently raided the Roman frontiers from across the Caucasus.

During this period, Armazi was governed by a hereditary pitiakhsh, whose rank approximated to that of viceroy or satrap, and was second in the official Iberian hierarchy after the king. The excavations of the hereditary necropolis of this dynasty yielded engraved gems bearing portraits of two of these viceroys, Asparukh (probably the contemporary of the Roman emperor Hadrian, 117-138 AD) and Zevakh (fl. 150 AD), a rare example of authentic, pre-Christian Georgian portraiture. Aramaic inscriptions from Armazi mention also the royal architect and the epitropos ("Lord Chamberlain").

Armazi played a central role in ancient Georgian cultural life and in the evolution of local epigraphy in Georgia, prior to the invention of the Georgian alphabet in the 5th century. Among a number of curious inscriptions found at Armazi, the most important is the bilingual Greco-Aramaic tombstone inscription commemorating the short-lived Serapita and her noble lineage. It contains an unusual, in its ductus and some of its forms, version of the Aramaic alphabet which came to be known as the "Armazi script" although it can also be found outside Armazi, in other parts of Georgia.

With the transfer of the Georgian capital to Tbilisi in the late 5th or early 6th century, Armazi went into a gradual decline. It still had its own high-ranking commandant, a post held in A.D. 545 by a certain Wistam. The city was finally destroyed and razed to the ground in 736 by the Arab commander Marwan ibn Muhammad (the future Umayyad Caliph Marwan II).

The city of Armazi has never been revived since then, but a Georgian Orthodox monastery of St. Nino was constructed there between 1150 and 1178. This is a six-apse hall church which, as well as its associated structures, is now largely in ruins and only some fragments of the 12th-century murals have survived.