Kingdom of Armenia (antiquity)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Kingdom of Armenia endured for nearly eight centuries, from 331 BC to 428 AD, outlasting empires that most schoolchildren learn as the dominant powers of the ancient world. It watched the Seleucids collapse, absorbed pieces of their territory, and survived long enough to become the first state in all of history to officially adopt Christianity as its religion. How did a landlocked highland kingdom hold on so long, squeezed between Rome on one side and Parthia on the other? That is the central puzzle here. What made Armenia worth fighting over so relentlessly? How did three distinct royal dynasties each take their turn running it, and what finally ended it? And what happened to the remarkable city that a Carthaginian general allegedly helped design?

• 2. The Highland Before the Kingdom

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  Before the 9th century BC, the Armenian Highlands were home to Proto-Armenian and other tribes that had not yet formed anything resembling a unified state. The first major political entity to rule across a significant stretch of those highlands was the Kingdom of Urartu, known also as the Kingdom of Van or Ararat, and called Biainili in the language its rulers actually spoke. Urartu spent years locked in competition with Assyria over the highlands of Ararat and the Fertile Crescent. Neither kingdom won that contest cleanly. Both fell to Iranian invaders arriving from the east: first the Medes, then the Achaemenid Persians, in the 6th century BC. The conquered territory was reorganized as a satrapy simply called Armenia. The Orontid dynasty governed it as satraps of the Achaemenid Empire for three centuries, until a Macedonian army under Alexander the Great destroyed the Achaemenid state at the Battle of Gaugamela in 331 BC. After Alexander's death in 323 BC, a Macedonian general named Neoptolemus briefly held Armenia, but when he died in 321 BC, the Orontids returned, this time not as governors answering to a Persian emperor but as kings in their own right.

• 3. Artaxias and the City Hannibal Designed

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  Artaxias I, also known as Artashes, took control of the Armenian throne in 189 BC after the Seleucid Empire was weakened by its defeat at the Battle of Magnesia at the hands of Rome. He was a Seleucid commander, but the source notes he may have been related to the Orontid dynasty he was supplanting. Artaxias did not simply inherit a tidy realm. He campaigned east to reunite Caspiane and Paytakaran, north to defeat the Iberians and bring Gugark back under Armenian control, and west to recover Karin, Ekeghik, and Derjan. His most lasting act may have been choosing the site of a new capital. King Artashes traveled to the confluence of the Eraskh and Metsamor rivers, and, taking a liking to the position of the hills adjacent to Mount Ararat, chose it as the location of his new city, naming it Artashat after himself. Greek historians Plutarch and Strabo both credited the Carthaginian general Hannibal with having planned and supervised the actual building of Artashat. Whether or not that story is literally true, the city's position in the Araks valley on the Silk Road made it a hub linking Persia and Mesopotamia with the Caucasus and Asia Minor. Numerous bathhouses, markets, workshops, and administrative buildings rose during Artashes I's own reign. Artashat was also given its own treasury and customs. Its amphitheater was added later, during the reign of Artavasdes II, who ruled from 55 to 34 BC.

• 4. Tigranes the Great and the Brief Empire

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  Tigranes the Great saw an opportunity in the chronic civil wars tearing the Seleucid Empire apart. In 83 BC, at the invitation of one of the warring factions in Syria, he marched in and made himself ruler, effectively ending what was left of the Seleucid state. He ruled Syria peacefully for 17 years. At the height of his power, his territory extended beyond the Armenian Highland into parts of the Caucasus and the area that is now south-eastern Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Lebanon. The source names Iberia, Albania, Cappadocia, Cilicia, Armenian Mesopotamia, Osroene, Adiabene, Assyria, Commagene, Sophene, Judea, and Atropatene as territories incorporated under his rule, with Parthia and certain Arab tribes paying him tribute as vassals. To anchor this expanded domain geographically, Tigranes founded an entirely new capital, Tigranakert, placed to sit at a more central point within the empire's expanded boundaries. Its population reached 120,000. The empire did not last. Rome moved east with overwhelming force, and by 69 BC Tigranes had been defeated. Armenia shrank back toward its original highland core, and the remaining Artaxiad kings ruled as Roman clients until they were deposed in 12 AD, partly because of suspected loyalty to Parthia.

• 5. Caught Between Two Empires

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  From 52 AD onward, the Arsacid dynasty governed Armenia, founded when Tiridates I, a member of the Parthian Arsacid family, was proclaimed king. This created an almost permanent structural tension. Rome considered Armenia a client kingdom in law, but its rulers came from Parthian stock, and Roman writers of the period thought that Nero had in practice yielded Armenia to the Parthians. The back-and-forth was exhausting. The Parthians forced Armenia into submission in 37 AD; the Romans retook it in 47 AD. In 51 AD, an Iberian invasion backed by Parthia, led by Rhadamistus, captured it again. The period of acute instability closed in 66 AD when Tiridates I was crowned king of Armenia by Nero himself, an event that resolved the conflict diplomatically through the Treaty of Rhandeia of 63. That treaty established the principle that members of the Parthian Arsacid house would rule Armenia as formal client kings of Rome. A second major disruption came under Emperor Lucius Verus, who led a campaign from 162 to 165 after Vologases IV of Parthia invaded and placed his chief general on the Armenian throne. Roman armies retook the capital and installed Sohaemus, a Roman citizen of Armenian heritage, as king. Parthian forces recaptured most of the lost ground in 166 during an epidemic that weakened the Roman legions. Armenia briefly became an outright Roman province from 114 to 118 under Emperor Trajan, but that annexation did not hold.

• 6. Christianity and the End of the Kingdom

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  Gregory the Illuminator is the figure the source credits with spreading Christianity through Armenia, working during a reign that saw Christians persecuted by kings including Sanatruk, Axidares, Khosrov I, and Tiridates III himself. Tiridates III eventually converted and made Christianity the official state religion. The traditional date given for this conversion is 301, which preceded the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great's own conversion and the Edict of Milan by roughly a dozen years, a margin the source underscores explicitly. This made Armenia the first state in history to officially embrace Christianity. The city of Vagharshapat, which had served as capital from 120 to 330 AD, was eventually renamed Etchmiadzin after the Mother Cathedral built there, and beginning in 301 it became the spiritual centre of Armenian national life. In 387, Rome and the Sassanid Persian Empire divided Armenia between them. Eastern Armenia remained nominally a kingdom within the Persian sphere until 428, when the local nobility removed the last Arsacid king and the Sassanids replaced the monarchy with a marzban, a governor, inaugurating the Marzpanate period. The city of Dvin, built by Khosrov III the Small in 335, then became the administrative seat of these governors. Independent Armenian statehood would not return until the Bagratuni dynasty reconstituted it in 885.

• 7. The Cavalry and the Legions

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  At its peak under Tigranes the Great, the Armenian army was staggering in scale. The Jewish historian Josephus counted 500,000 men in total, including camp followers with camels, donkeys, mules, sheep, cattle, and goats. The source notes carefully that these figures from Israelite historians of the time were probably exaggerated. The core fighting force included 120,000 infantrymen and 12,000 mounted archers; an additional 12,000 heavy cavalrymen made up an armored striking force similar to those used by the Seleucids and Parthians. Plutarch recorded that Armenian archers could kill from 200 meters. The Roman historian Sallustius Crispus described the Armenian cavalry as remarkable by the beauty of their horses and armor. The elite mounted unit protecting the king directly was called the Azatavrear in antiquity, consisting of 6,000 heavily armored horsemen; in the later medieval period this royal guard shrank to 3,000. In wartime, total cavalry numbers could rise to at least 20,000. Rome eventually organized permanent legions in Armenian territory. The Armenian First Legion, mentioned in the late-antique register known as the Notitia Dignitatum, was most likely formed in the 2nd or 3rd century AD and participated in Emperor Julianus Apostata's Persian campaign in 363. The Armenian Second Legion, created around the end of the 3rd century or the beginning of the 4th, built a permanent camp at Satala and was recorded in 360 AD as part of the garrison at Bezabde on the upper Tigris, serving alongside the Legions Parthica and II Flavia. When Bezabde was taken by Persian forces in 390 AD, a severe slaughter fell on the garrison and inhabitants, yet the Armenian Second Legion appears to have survived; it turns up again in the Notitia Dignitatum, written in the 5th century, by which time it had become part of the Byzantine army.

• 8. Gods, Scripts, and Inherited Traditions

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  The pre-Christian Armenian pantheon was a layered inheritance from the cultures that had shaped the region. Aramazd, cognate of the Iranian Ahura Mazda, stood at the head of the gods and was identified with Zeus in Greek interpretations. Anahit, cognate of the Iranian Anahita, held temples in Armavir, Artashat, and Ashtishat. Vahagn, the storm god and dragon slayer, shared his central temple at Derik with the fertility goddess Astghik, and the holiday of Vardavar was originally celebrated in her honor. The god Mihr, cognate of the Persian Mithra, was worshipped at a temple in Bagaharich, and the temple of Garni was dedicated to him. Zoroastrianism ran alongside these traditions well into the Parthian period. Tiridates I, founder of the Arsacid branch in Armenia, was himself a Zoroastrian priest or magus. His famous journey to Rome in 65-66 AD is one of the documented episodes illustrating how seriously the Armenian Arsacids took Zoroastrian observance. The written Armenian language came later. Before Saint Mesrop Mashtots created the Armenian alphabet in 405 AD, Armenians used Aramaic and Greek scripts. Mashtots worked alongside Isaac of Armenia, also known as Sahak Partev, primarily to produce a translation of the Bible into Armenian. The first sentence traditionally said to have been written down in Armenian by Mashtots comes from Solomon's Book of Proverbs: to know wisdom and instruction; to perceive the words of understanding. The scholar Moses of Chorene preserved much of what survives of pre-Christian Armenian literature, including a pagan song about the birth of Vahagn, which describes the god running out of flame with fiery hair, a flaming beard, and eyes that were as suns.