Pharnavazid dynasty

The Pharnavazid (tr) is the name of the first dynasty of Georgian kings of Kartli (Iberia) preserved by The Georgian Chronicles. Their rule lasted, with intermissions, from the 3rd century BC to the 2nd century AD. The main male line is reported to have become extinct early on and followed by houses related to it in the female line. By the close of the 2nd century AD, the Pharnavazid rule came to an end and the Arsacid Dynasty took over the crown of Iberia. According to the early medieval Georgian chronicle, The Life of the Georgian Kings, the dynasty descended from Pharnavaz I, the founder of the Kingdom of Iberia, who ousted Azo, a ruler allegedly left by Alexander the Great to govern the country. Pharnavaz, whose story is saturated with legendary imagery and symbols, is not attested directly in non-Georgian sources and there is not definite contemporary indication that he was the first of the Georgian kings. However, the Georgian dynastic tag Parnavaziani ("of/from/named for Parnavaz"), which the early Armenian histories have preserved as P’arnawazean (Faustus 5.15; 5th century) and P’arazean (Primary History of Armenia 14; probably the early 5th century), is an acknowledgment that a king named Pharnavaz was understood to have been the founder of a Georgian dynasty. It seems more feasible that as the memory of the historical facts faded, the real Pharnavaz "accumulated a legendary façade" and emerged as the model pre-Christian monarch in the Georgian annals. Although Alexander's expedition into the Georgian lands is entirely fictional, Georgian and Classical evidence suggests that the kings of Iberia cultivated close relations with the Seleucid Empire, a Hellenistic successor to Alexander's short-lived empire centered on Syria, and at times recognized its suzerainty, probably aiding, as Professor Cyril Toumanoff has implied, their overlords in holding in check the Orontid Dynasty of neighboring Armenia. Pharnavaz is supposed by Toumanoff to have ruled from 299 to 234 BC. His son, Saurmag (r.