Adam

Adam, whom Sumbat Davitis-dze calls Asam, is one of the four legendary brothers whom the eleventh-century Life and Tale of the Bagratids brings to Kartli as founders of the Georgian Bagrationi. According to Sumbat, seven brothers of the house of King David left Palestine and were baptized in Armenia; three stayed there as ancestors of the Armenian Bagratuni, while four went on to Kartli, where Guaram was chosen eristavi and founded the ruling line, and Sahak settled in Kakheti.

Asam and his brother Varazvard went east to Kambechani, where, the chronicle says, they killed the Persian commander, took possession of the province, and made their seat at Khornabuji; their descendants, Sumbat adds, still ruled there in his own day. Khornabuji, a fortress on the Tsiv-Gombori range near modern Dedoplistsqaro in eastern Kakheti, is a real and ancient site, attested in the fifth century and taken by the Sasanians around the turn of the sixth. But no date, wife, or child is recorded for Asam, and no source outside Sumbat mentions him.

Modern scholarship, following Cyril Toumanoff, treats the story of the seven brothers as a dynastic legend created to give the Bagrationi a biblical ancestry; the historical Georgian Bagratids descend from the Armenian Bagratuni through Adarnase, father of Ashot I, in the late eighth century. Adam therefore stands at the head of this genealogy as a figure of tradition rather than of record.