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The ancient world, The Ancient World Bloodline

Episode B25 Diskindle.

What are you? What did it mean to be King of Armenia? To Rome and Parthia it was little more than

a glorified buffer state but that was never the story the Armenians told themselves.

Their sense of history at least went back to the Arontids, the kings who gone lion hunting with Cyrus the Great, and gracefully

sidestepped the conquest of Alexander. In 190 BC, the Arontids were replaced by the Aroxiads, heirs of the Seleucid general Aroxis, who founded the new

Armenian capital of Artoxada. The city was cited far to the north at the

confluence of the Aroxys and Aksurian rivers, on a plan supposedly

designed by Hannibal of Carthage.

According to Streboe, the Punic general and exile dreamt of raising an Armenian Carthage

to replace the one conquered by Rome.

Hannibal wasn't the first to recognize the site's potential,

and Artoxada was built on ancient foundations. The original builders were already lost to history, but their

monuments endured. All across the kingdom, huge stone fortresses, crowned mountaintops, an alien

writing marked the remains of temples and tombs. Scholars might recognize the script as one still used in Mesopotamia, but the language was already

indecipitable. In fact, for the next 2,000 years, the story of the Arartians would remain untold, looming like a fortress, and silent as a tomb.

Our Toxiad power reached its zenith under the rule of Tigranis the Great, conqueror of the

near east and terror of the republic.

It was Tigranis who built the southern capital of Tigraneserta to oversee a freshly one empire stretching from Anatolia to the Syrian desert.

But ironically it was also under Tigranes that Armenia lost its independence.

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