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.