Kin and culture: clan, household and family formation in late antique Armenia

Thesis

The importance of Armenia’s hereditary naxarar elite in the late antique and medieval eras has long been acknowledged by scholars, and the region’s peripheral position has made these landed aristocrats a focus of academics of the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires also. However, study of naxarar families has not been accompanied by dedicated scholarship concerning the nature of family itself as an institution within Armenia. The following thesis acts as a first step, examining how Armenian families formed, operated and what expectations were placed upon their members from the fifth century until the mid-seventh century CE.

The thesis argues the family was perhaps the most significant political entity in late antique Armenian life. Membership within a naxarar clan was more significant than official service in the Aršakuni royal court or Byzantine or Sasanian imperial administration. Indeed, monarchical and imperial courts, as well as the native Christian clerical administration, even drew on these clans to support their authority. Clan power was safeguarded from imperial interference by Armenia’s geography, strategic location and probably the institution’s deep integration at less prestigious (and less visible) levels of society, with clerics, lesser nobles and perhaps non-nobles all being arranged in clans. This was reinforced by the interlacing nature of the household, which incorporated individuals of various clans and social classes through marriage, service, slavery and dayeakut‘iwn and, in doing so, better embedded the family within the social framework.

Armenia is not unique in emphasising the family’s place as a critical institution, and Kin and Culture finds substantial parallels between Armenian and Iranian practice, most notably that of the Sasanians’ Parthian predecessors. However, Armenia is a particularly visible example of clan power. Analysis explicitly through the lens of family and family practices has implications for our understandings of late antique Armenian culture, society and law.

Authors: Alford, D

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-jbeappkor
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: household; Armenian Christianity; family; Sasanian Empire; Naxarar; Armenia; Byzantine Empire; Late Antiquity; childhood; clan; family formation; Dayeak (Wet nursing); marriage
• Subjects: Anthropology and history; Family; History