Sumbat I of Iberia

Sumbat I was king of the Iberians from 937 to 958 and the ancestor of every later Bagrationi monarch of Georgia, though his own reign left almost no trace in the sources. He was probably the fourth and youngest son of Adarnase IV, the founder of the kingdom. When his eldest brother David II of Iberia died childless in 937 the royal title passed to Sumbat rather than to either of the brothers between them, Ashot II of Tao, who held the Byzantine title of kouropalates, and Bagrat I of Tao; the chronicles do not explain the choice.

The kingship he inherited was a limited one. Since 904 the kings of Abkhazia had controlled Shida Kartli, the heartland of the old Iberian monarchy, and the Bagrationi kings governed from Javakheti and the Tao valleys as subordinate neighbors of Abkhazia. Around 954, on the death of Ashot II, Sumbat appears to have received Lower Tao and the dignity of kouropalates. The Georgian chronicle records wars between Iberia and Kakheti in these years without naming Sumbat as a participant, and the nineteenth-century editor Marie-Félicité Brosset could find little more to say of him than that he passed into history. Modern writers have summed up his twenty-one years as insignificant.

Sumbat is commemorated in church inscriptions at Ishkhani and Doliskana. He died in 958 and was succeeded by his elder son Bagrat II of Iberia. Through Bagrat II, Gurgen of Iberia, and Bagrat III his line carried the royal title of Adarnase IV into the united Georgian kingdom.