Stephen H. Rapp Jr., Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, Caucasia and the Iranian Commonwealth in Late Antique Georgian Literature

Abstract

Stephen H. Rapp Jr., Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, Caucasia and the Iranian Commonwealth in Late Antique Georgian Literature. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014, 513 pp.
Stephen H. Rapp’s recent monograph provides a detailed study of early medieval Georgian historical literature. Apart from a thorough historical, literary and archaeological contextualisation, Rapp provides a rigorous textological study of this controversial corpus. Rapp’s primary mission is to
reconstruct hypothetically the early stages and layers of late antique Georgian historiography, which has allegedly been stripped from its original Sasanian cloth and has survived only in early medieval and indeed pro-Byzantine rewriting. Although in many ways debatable, Rapp’s hypothesis is an important step towards the identification of late antique Georgian writing and a possible solution to the perennial question of where and why late antique Georgian historical writing disappeared, only to reemerge in its Bagratid guise.