Place · diaspora settlement · Armenia
Tarōn
Also known as Tarōn — the Armenian account
An Armenian tradition holds that two Indian princes, Gisaneh and Demetr, fled to Armenia in the second century BCE, were granted the Tarōn district, and founded a settlement with temples to their own gods that lasted some four centuries until Gregory the Illuminator destroyed them and built the monastery of Glak on the site. The account is in the History of Tarōn, whose opening section is ascribed to Zenob Glak, Gregory's Syrian companion and the monastery's first abbot.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Qualified / contested
- Location
- 39.000, 41.400
Worth knowing
The story survives because the monastery that replaced the temples kept it: the account of what stood there before is preserved by the institution that demolished it.
This rests on a single source of disputed date. The History of Tarōn was compiled by John Mamikonean in the tenth century; Zenob's portion may go back to a fifth-century Syriac original but is a frankly legendary account of Gregory. No archaeological or independent textual corroboration for an Indian settlement in Tarōn is known.
Connections (2)
- AnalogueAksum
Two claims about Indians settling far from India, and they are evidentially opposite. Aksum's trade with India is attested by the Periplus, by Cosmas Indicopleustes, by excavated goods and by coinage — it can be argued about in detail but not in principle. The Armenian account of two Indian princes founding a settlement in Tarōn in the second century BCE rests on one text of disputed date, compiled in the tenth century from a possibly fifth-century original, with no archaeological or independent textual support at all.
- Route adjacencyMerv
Whether or not anyone founded a settlement in Tarōn, the road existed. Merv on the Murghab was the hinge of the overland route between India, Iran and the Mediterranean, and anyone travelling from the north-west of the subcontinent toward Armenia in the second century BCE would have gone through it or its neighbours — the Indo-Greek and then Kushan world reached this far, Buddhist establishments are attested at Merv, and Indian goods and people demonstrably moved along the line. The route's plausibility is not the same as evidence for the settlement, which remains a single late text's claim.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Zenob Glak”. History of Tarōn, ed. Langlois (Venice, 1832); Robert Thomson on the pseudo-historical Armenian tradition.
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