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Archiver > GEN-MEDIEVAL > 1996-07 > 0836379455


From: Stewart Baldwin <>
Subject: Re: DFA: possible pre-Arsacid link
Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 07:37:35 GMT


Chris Bennett <> wrote:

[much snipping]

>Sorry you feel I misrepresented you -- I won't argue the point.

No harm done. Although I have no objection to discussing what you
might call "discontinuous" descents at the dynastic level, I have very
little taste for these attempts to fill in every single generation by
guesswork, even if there is no good evidence to support the exact line
of descent. So, I guess it kind of hit a raw nerve when I saw my name
attached to such an attempt.

>On Strabo, if we do open him up to the lifetime of the Atropatenian
>dynasty, then by far the most likely identification of "kings of the
>Syrians" are the Seleucids themselves. In other words, the Atropatenians
>could be direct Seleucid descendants. [A Seleucid marrying an Atropatenian
>princess seems far less likely, since there's a good chance we'd know about
>it -- we're quite well informed about the marriages of Seleucid kings]

>>>alternatives -- Emesa, Osrhoene, Judea -- all look pretty bad); whether it
>>
>>Why do they look bad? Although I agree that Commagene is the most
>>likely alternative to the strictly literal reading of Syria, I see no
>>reason why the others must necessarily be excluded.

>I don't necessarily exclude them, I just think they are much less likely,
>as follows: Judea -- religiously exclusive; Emesa -- very nouveau and
>very small, hardly worth mentioning; Osrhoene -- somewhat similar, but
>probably the best bet of the three. Commagene while small is certainly not
>nouveau. It is also culturally much closer to Atropatene (Iranian, not
>Jewish or Syrian Arab) than the other three.

Emesa was important enough for its royalty to intermarry with the
royalty of both Commagene and Judaea in the first century. Judaea
can't be ruled out because of religion, since there are enough other
marriages between the Judaean royalty and non-Jewish dynasties to show
that they had no objection to such marriage alliances. In such
dynastic marriages, political alliances are generally more important
than religious or cultural factors. I agree that Commagene is the
most likely one of the four (assuming that the relevant marriage is
post-Seleucid), but I don't think that it is more likely than the
other three possibilities _combined_.

...

>>One of the biggest problems here is that the primary sources on which
>>the descents are based are often not readily available, or are in a
>>language (such as Armenian) which is not widely understood. Many of
>>the earliest Armenian hisorical works now exist in recently published
>>English translations, which help quite a bit for the history of early
>>Christian Armenia, but does not help much for the later periods. Any
>>careful review of these medieval Armenian links is going to require
>>availability of the primary sources on which the line is based.

>Agreed -- and failing publication of accessible versions of the sources the
>best bet is for someone able to read them in the original to publish a
>review!

Good idea. Any volunteers out there who speak Armenian? One thing
that is important here is to get the citations as exact as possible,
subject to the obvious restriction that a translation can never be an
exact quote. I have seen too many cases where the citation gives an
interpretation of the original statement, so that it is difficult to
tell what the original source actually said (or worse, the source
actually said something different from the interpretation). Analysis
and discussion are fine, but need to be done separately from the
quotation or abstract of the original source, so that we know which is
which. (Remember the very long Erik-Sigrid thread recently, when it
was discovered after considerable discussion that some of the
arguments were being based on a statement that Theitmar of Merseburg
never made.)

...

>>It is virtually certain that such a thing is not possible with sources
>>currently known, and so the realization of such wishful thinking, if
>>it ever occurs, would have to be through the discovery of previously
>>unknown sources, most likely archaeological sources. <snip>

>Absolutely agreed -- I _did_ characterise this idea as the limits of
>wishful thinking! The main reason to consider it at all is that there is
>now a bridge from the imperial Hittites to the post imperial kingdoms,
>published only in 1988, and at Carchemish there is a suggestion that this
>may become (NB future tense!) traceable down to the kings who fought
>Assyria. Surely there are archives still to be found -- Wasshukanni,
>capital of the Mitannians is still unknown, and places like Aleppo and
>Damascus, which have been continously inhabited, have therefore not been
>subject to systematic archaeological search. I agree with you that clay is
>the most likely form such archives would take, though stone inscriptions,
>even brief ones, do tend to give genealogical data.

I would be interested in hearing further details about this "bridge"
between the Hittite Empire and the later kingdoms.

Stewart Baldwin

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