Mariam

Mariam was one of the four daughters of Archil, the Khosroid prince of Kakheti whom the Georgian church venerates as a martyr, and she belongs to the last generation of the ancient royal house of Kartli. She is known from a single sentence of the chronicle attributed to Juansher in the Georgian Chronicles, which closes its account of Archil by recording that he "had two sons, Juansher and Iovane, and four daughters: Gurandukht, Mariam, Mirandukht and Shushan." Nothing further is said of her individually, and no source gives her dates of birth, marriage, or death. Her parentage nevertheless places her at a meeting point of two houses. Her father was the last male heir of the Khosroid kings descended from Mirian III, and her mother was a daughter of Guaram the curopalate, ruler of Klarjeti and Javakheti, whom the chronicler traced back to King Vakhtang Gorgasali through his Greek wife. Archil's children thus united the royal Khosroid line with the princely house that governed southwestern Georgia before the rise of the Bagrationi. The Martyrdom of Saint Archil records that after their father's execution, dated to 786 by Toumanoff and most modern historians though church tradition places it in 744, the family divided: Iovane withdrew to Egrisi in the west with his mother and two of his sisters, while Juansher stayed in Kartli and Kakheti with the other two, one of them the youngest, Shushan. The text does not say which group Mariam joined, and her later life is unrecorded.