Тмогвели, Саргис

Armenian often served as the medium for the transmission of a text, e. g. some of the works of Aristotle, Cyrus of Alexandria, and others, were translated into Georgian from Armenian texts. Georgian histories of literature quote several writers of Armenian origin, like S. Tmogveli, Feshand Pashvi-Berdvadze, while the Armenian Gevorg occurs in the history of Ethiopian literature. Some Byzantian scientists were Armenians, like the astronomer Bagrat in the eighth century, the philologist Hovhannes in the ninth cen\ury, the mathematician and geographer Nikolaios Artavazd Zmiurnaci in the fourteenth century; the seventeenth century Georgian historian and philologist Farsadan Georgidjanidze was also an Armenian. Centres of culture in the Near East periodically grew up with an ambiance favourable to the co-existence of different natural cultures and to mutual influences; in all these centres Armenians played a notable part: in Jerusalem, as we have seen above, and later in Tiflis in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. Tiflis was the cultural metropolis for Transcaucasia right into the twentieth century, and it was here that the eastern branch of Armenian culture centred up to the time when Yerevan ceased to be a backward provincial town (about the twenties of this century).