[5] Pharnavaz's rise, advent and imperial expansion of the Iberian monarchy was directly tied to the victory of Alexander the Great over the Achaemenid Empire.

[9] According to the c. 800 chronicle The Life of Kings, Pharnavaz had a distinguished genealogy, tracing back to Kartlos, the mythical ethnarch of Kartli.

[13] The entire story of Pharnavaz, although written by a Christian chronicler, abounds in ancient Iranian-like imagery and mystic allusions, a reflection of the archaeologically confirmed cultural and presumably political ties between Iran and Kartli of that time.

The name "Pharnavaz" is also an illustrative example with its root par- being based upon the Persian farnah, the divine radiance believed by the ancient Iranians to mark a legitimate dynast (cf.

[18] Aged 3,[19][20] small Pharnavaz's family is destroyed, and his heritage is usurped by Azon installed by Alexander the Great during his campaign in Kartli.

[9] The main threads of Pharnavaz's story - a fatherless boy hidden and raised in a remote mountains, a forgotten lineage, his dreams, sacral kingship, solar imagery, the hunt, discovery of cave-concealed treasure etc.

[2] He is reported to have acknowledged the suzerainty of the Seleucids, the Hellenistic successors of Alexander in the Middle East, who are afforded by the Georgian chronicles the generic name of Antiochus.

[30] Iberia had in total seven eristavis, in Colchis,[31] Kakheti,[32] Khunani[33] (modern-day northern Azerbaijan), Samshvilde[34] (Kvemo Kartli), Tsunda[35] (included Javakheti, Kola and Artaani), Odzrkhe[36] and Klarjeti.

The major motive of later historian of the chronicles was to convince posterity that the basic political structure of Kartli was created by the very first Georgian monarch in the wake of Wars of Alexander the Great; was of Achaemenid administrative system and had remained stable throughout Hellenistic, Parthian and Sasanian times.

[39] The hierarchic structure created by Pharnavaz was the following: king; commander-in-chief (spaspet) of the royal army; eristavis; middle commanders (atasistavis tsikhistavis) of the garrisons stationed in the royal strongholds; junior commanders (asistavis) who were the younger sons of the aristocratic families; mercenary professional warriors from the neighboring countries and all the soldiers organized around the entire kingdom.

[40] It is evident that the division of Iberia by Pharnavaz into saeristavos served first and foremost a military aim, namely the organization of people for the purpose of defence.

[41] While Georgian and Classical evidence makes the contemporaneous Kartlian links with the Seleucids plausible (Toumanoff has even implied that the kings of Kartli might have aided the Seleucids in holding the resurgent Orontids of Armenia in check[42]), Pharnavaz's alleged reform of the eristavi fiefdoms is most likely a back-projection of the medieval pattern of subdivision to the remote past.

[43] Pharnavaz made alliances with various North Caucasian peoples during his reign, to whom he called upon for help against both Macedonia and internal foes.

[39] Several modern scholars have been tempted to make identification between the Pharnavaz of the medieval Georgian tradition and the Pharasmanes of the Greco-Roman historian Arrian, a 2nd-century AD author of The Anabasis of Alexander.

[49][54] According to Arrian:[55] At this time also came Pharasmanes, king of the Chorasmians, to Alexander with 1500 horsemen, who affirmed that he dwelt on the confines of the nations of the Colchians and the women called Amazons, and promised, if Alexander was willing to march against these nations in order to subjugate the races in this district whose territories extended to the Black Sea, to act as his guide through the mountains and to supply his army with provisions.

After introducing Pharasmanes as a friend to Artabazos II of Phrygia, to whom he had intrusted the government of the Bactrians, and to all the other viceroys who were his neighbors, he sent him back to his own abode.

He added that when Asia was in his power he would return to Greece, and thence make an expedition with all his naval and military forces to the eastern part of the Black Sea through the Hellespont and Propontis.

And he desired Pharasmanes to reserve the fulfilment of his present promises until then.The Bagrationi dynasty claimed descent directly from Pharnavaz.