ter Armenia, whilst the trans-Euphratensian western country became Lesser Armenia. There were, moreover, several still-Urartian regions on the Armenian Plateau, north-east and east of Greater Armenia, but of them practically nothing is known to us. Very little is also known of the history of the Kingdom of Lesser Armenia, which from Seleucid and then Pontic overloardshipi passed under that of Rome, when chance Galatian, Cappadocian, Polemonid, Atropatenian, Thracian, and Judaean princes reigned in it, and which, A.D. 72, was annexed by Rome, having early left the orbit of Caucasia. Quite different is the case of Greater Armenia, whose history is comparatively wll established. Already in the Achaemenian phase, the office of Satrap of Armenia became hereditary in the Iranian families of the Hydarnids and, then, the Orontids. The latter claimed Hydarnid descent and were, moreover, related through marriage to the Achaemenids. Orontid rule in Armenia was grounded in the ascendancy that the satrapal position of the dynasty and its expansion over the remaining Urartian lands secured for it with regard to the local dynasts, and, in the Hellenistic phase, also in the control it exercised over the great Armenian centres of international trade. The collapse of the Iranian empire and the advent of Alexander the Great. set Orontid Armenia free of foreign domination. The fact that the Orontids were descended from the Achaemenid Great Kings, who were no more, and that they held sway over most of the territory of the old Monarchy of Urartu, when conjoined with their power and their de facto autonomy, led them to assume the status of kings. Thus the First Armenian Monarchy (as we may call it) was founded; it was to be eclipsed by the Artaxiad Monarchy that succeeded it, and thus forgotten by histor until its rediscovery today. The Orontid kingdom was never conquered by Alexander, but was nominally included first in his empire, and then, after a period of complete independence in the years 321-301 B.C., in the empire of his Seleucid successors.
The Orontid kings chafed under Seleucid suzerainty. And so, about, 212 B.C., the energetic Antiochus III had to resort to a military expedition in order to bring King Xerxes of Armenia to obedience. Sometime later, about 200 B.C. the latter's successor, Orontes IV, was faced with a revolt of Artaxias, who appears to have been a local dynast. It is not beyond possibility that Antiochus III had his hand in this, perhaps in order to vitiate another attempt to profit by it, as will be seen presently. Having overthrown Orontes, Artaxias possessed himself of most of Greater Armenia, but not of the entire kingdom, because a scion of the old dynasty, named Zariadris, established himself in the southwestern Armenian province of Sophene (ancient Ishuwa), as well as in the lands of Acilisene and Odomantis, north of it across the Arsanias. Sophene, situated between the Tigris and the Euphrates, south of the Arsanias and