Pharnavaz I of Iberia - Medieval Texts and Historical Context

Medieval Texts and Historical Context

According to the c. 800 chronicle The Life of Kings, Parnavaz had a distinguished genealogy, tracing back to Kartlos, the mythical ethnarch of Kartli. His paternal uncle, Samara, held the position of mamasakhlisi ("father of the house") of the Georgian tribes around Mtskheta. Parnavaz’s mother is claimed to have been an Iranian. The entire story of Parnavaz, although written by a Christian chronicler, abounds in ancient Iranian-like imagery and mystic allusions, a reflection of the archaeologically confirmed cultural and presumably political ties between Iran and Kartli of that time. The name "Parnavaz" is also an illustrative example with its root par- being based upon the Persian farnah, the divine radiance believed by the ancient Iranians to mark a legitimate dynast (cf. khvarenah). The dynastic tag Parnavaziani ("of/from/named for Parnavaz") is also preserved in the early Armenian histories as P'arnawazean (Faustus 5.15; fifth century) and P'arazean (Primary History of Armenia 14; probably the early fifth century), an acknowledgment that a king named Parnavaz was understood to have been the founder of a Georgian dynasty.

Perhaps the most artistically rounded section of the Georgian annals, the narrative follows Parnavaz’s life from birth to burial. The little Parnavaz’s family is destroyed, and his heritage is usurped by Azon installed by Alexander the Great during his mythic campaign in Kartli. He is brought up fatherless, but a magic dream, in which he anoints himself with the essence of the Sun, heralds the peripeteia. He is persuaded by this vision to "devote to noble deeds". He then sets off and goes hunting. In a pursuit of a deer, he encounters a mass of treasure stored in a hidden cave. Parnavaz retrieves the treasure and exploits it to mount a loyal army against the tyrannical Azon. He is aided by Kuji, the lord of Egrisi (the Colchis of Classical writers – Kuji is unattested elsewhere), who eventually marries Parnavaz's sister. The rebels are also joined by 1,000 soldiers from Azon's camp; they are anachronistically referred to by the author as Romans, and claimed to have been entitled by the victorious Parnavaz as aznauri (i.e., nobles) after Azon (this etymology is false, however).

In the ensuing battle, Azon is defeated and killed, and Parnavaz becomes the king of Kartli at the age of twenty-seven. He is reported to have acknowledged the suzerainty of the Seleucids, the Hellenistic successors of Alexander in the Middle East, who are afforded by the Georgian chronicles the generic name of Antiochus. Parnavaz is also said to have patterned his administration upon an "Iranian" model, and have introduced a military-administrative organization based on a network of regional governors or eristavi. While Georgian and Classical evidence makes the contemporaneous Kartlian links with the Seleucids plausible (Toumanoff has even implied that the kings of Kartli might have aided the Seleucids in holding the resurgent Orontids of Armenia in check), Parnavaz's alleged reform of the eristavi fiefdoms is most likely a back-projection of the medieval pattern of subdivision to the remote past.

Parnavaz is then reported to have embarked on social and cultural projects; he supervises two building projects: the raising of the idol Armazi – reputedly named after him – on a mountain ledge and the construction of a similarly named fortress. He is also alleged to have invented (or reformed) the Georgian alphabet, which was actually devised after the adoption of Christianity (c. 337 AD), but the existence of a peculiar local form of Aramaic in pre-Christian Georgia has been archaeologically documented.

The chronicles report Parnavaz's lengthy reign of sixty-five years. Upon his death, he was buried in front of the idol Armazi and worshipped. His son, Saurmag, became a successor to the throne.