IN CA. 600 CE the Sasanian Shah Ḵosrow II (r. 590– 628) appointed the Armenian nobleman Smbat Bagratuni marzpan (marzbān) or governor of the province of Vrkan (Gorgān/Hyrcania) to the east of the Caspian Sea as a reward for his successful military suppression of revolts in the empire. Upon his arrival in Vrkan, Smbat came across a colony of captives who had been deported from their native lands at some point in the past to the edge of the desert that stretched from Turkistan to Dehestān. The colony consisted of peoples captured from Armenia, the Byzantine Empire, and Syria, and included Christians as well as “infidels,” possibly adherents of some form of Zoroastrianism or northern Mesopotamian Semitic cult. The episode is first recorded in Armenian historiography in the seventh-century History of Armenia attributed to Sebēos, who focuses on the captives from Armenia. He recounts that the captives had lost their language, literacy, and religious hierarchy, but he does not explain what identified them as “Armenian,” given that these people had lost the ability to speak, read, and write Armenian, and did not have a priest. Nonetheless, they were subsequently “confirmed in the faith,” taught to speak and become literate in Armenian, and had one of their elders, a certain Abēl, appointed as priest for their community.

The story was subsequently repeated in historiographical works up through the thirteenth century. The passage is particularly suggestive because the notion of “lost Armenians” opened a space for the narrators who retold it to inscribe their own ideology of what constituted “Armenianness” and who had the authority and legitimacy to confer that identity. In other words, the story persisted as a lieu de mémoire, a literary site whose conscious remembering provided an opportunity for each author to stake claims to “Armenianness.” This process of remembering did not comprise the mere repetition of information, but entailed strategies of unremembering, addition, and alteration. Beginning with a close reading of this passage in Sebēos, this chapter interrogates from a mnemohistorical perspective how later narrators modulated the story.