Rouran epochGöktürk epochUyghur epochKirghiz epoch
RouranFirst GöktürkTang ruleSecond GöktürkUyghurKirghizHunsWestern GöktürkTürgeshKarlukKhazar
  • 400
  • 500
  • 600
  • 700
  • 800
  • 900

The history that goes under the name of Sebeos is an Armenian chronicle of the seventh century.[1] Its subject is the reign of the Sasanian king Khosrow II, the last great war between Persia and Rome, and the first Arab conquests.[1] A short opening reaches back to the late fifth century. The narrative proper begins with the Armenian rising of 572.[2] For the Göktürks the text is the Armenian witness beside the Greek and the Chinese ones. It sees them from the Persian side of the frontier.

Manuscript and attribution

The text survives in one line of copies. The oldest witness was written in 1672 at the monastery of John the Baptist at Bitlis and is now in the Matenadaran in Erevan, no. 2639. Every other known copy derives from it, and an older manuscript of 1568 has disappeared.[3] The manuscripts give the work neither an author nor a title.[3] In 1833 it was identified as the lost history of Sebeos. It was printed at Constantinople in 1851 as the History of bishop Sebeos on Heraclius.[3]

The name Sebeos is known from one man, a bishop of the Bagratunikʿ who signed the canons of the council of Dvin in 645.[4] Later Armenian lists of historians name a Sebeos as the author of a History of Heraclius.[5] No later historian quotes the present text under his name. The fragments of a History of Heraclius that do survive tell the events differently.[6] The attribution is therefore a supposition, and the author and the original title are unknown.[7] The name is kept for convenience.[8]

Date and method

The main text ends in the middle of 655. A closing passage and three later notices take it to 661, the year Muʿāwiya became caliph.[9] The author was probably born near the beginning of the seventh century. He wrote close to the events of its middle decades.[2] He worked from documents. Whole letters stand in his text, and so does a Persian list of the governors of Armenia from 572 onwards, broken up across the narrative.[10] For the career of the Armenian general Smbat Bagratuni in Persian service, he drew on a lost biography written in praise of its subject.[11]

The Göktürks in the text

Sebeos names no Göktürk ruler. He speaks of “the great Khakʿan, king of the regions of the North”.[12] The wording presents him as one supreme ruler over the other khagans of the steppe.[13] On the far side of Persia’s frontier the text places Kushans and Tʿetals, and once the Mazkʿutʿkʿ. The name Tʿetal is used loosely. It covers the peoples of the east beside the Kushans, and elsewhere those of the north.[14]

The mother of Hormizd IV

In the account of the Persian succession, Sebeos says that the mother of Hormizd IV was called Kayēn and was “the daughter of the great Khakʿan, king of the Tʿetals”.[15] He does not name the khagan. He adds that her son was more ferocious on his mother’s side than on his father’s.[15] Whether that khagan was Istemi is not settled.

The same chapter tells how Vahram, prince of the eastern regions of Persia, attacked the army of the Tʿetals. He took Balkh and all the land of the Kushans beyond the Oxus.[16] Vahram is Bahram Chobin, the later rebel.[17] Beyond the great river he fought “the great king of the Mazkʿutʿkʿ”. He defeated his army and killed him.[16]

Smbat Bagratuni and the army of the great khagan

Smbat Bagratuni was commanding for Khosrow II in the north-east. The kings of the Kushans asked the great Khakʿan for help.[12] “A host of 300,000” came to their support and crossed the Oxus, which Sebeos calls the Vehrot.[12] It defeated the Persian relief force under Datoyean and raided as far as the borders of Rey and the province of Isfahan.[18] Then a command came from the great Khakʿan to the Chembukh. The army recrossed the river and went home.[18]

The figure of 300,000 is that of the critical text.[19] An older French translation gives thirty thousand.[20] Chembukh is a title, not a name.[21] It may be, like the Chepetukh of the next chapter, a corrupted form of yabgu. That is the title of the second-ranking khagan, which Movsēs Dasxurancʿi renders more closely as Jebu Khakʿan.[22]

Sebeos names no year for the campaign. One dating puts it in 597 and 598.[23] A second puts it in 614 and 615 and has the Göktürks take part only in the first season.[24] This dating counts back from Smbat’s death. Sebeos puts that death in the twenty-eighth year of Khosrow II, which is 616 or 617.[25] A third dating places the war in 606 and 607.[26]

The Pass of Chor, 627

After Smbat’s death Sebeos writes: “Then they rebelled and submitted to the great Khakʿan, king of the regions of the north, under the Chinese Chepetukh. They went from the east to the west across the regions of the north to join the army of that Chepetukh at the command of their king the Khakʿan. Passing through the Pass of Chor with many troops, they went to assist the king of the Greeks.”[25]

The sentence has no stated subject, and the paragraph seems to stand out of its place.[27] The Pass of Chor is the pass at Derbent.[28] The paragraph names no people.[27] It may be the one place where Sebeos tells of Khazar help for Heraclius.[29] Alternatively, the rebels were Kushans who joined the Göktürk invasion of Transcaucasia in 627. In that year the yabgu led a large army through the pass and met Heraclius before Tiflis.[30] In that case the epithet “Chinese” may echo the Göktürks’ wars on the Chinese frontier in the decade before.[30] The Armenian word also names a people of the Caucasus.[27]

In his prologue Sebeos had promised to tell of “the invasion of Heraclius into the northern regions to the king of the Tʿetals”.[31] The history as it survives does not keep the promise. This paragraph is all that stands of it.[27] Whether the yabgu of 627 was Tong Yabgu himself is disputed.

The Tʿetalkʿ at the Caspian gates, 655

The name returns at the end of the history. An Arab army marched north towards the Caspian gates, crossed the Pass of Chor and ravaged the country at the foot of the mountain.[32] A small force from the place called the Gate of the Huns, its guards, defeated it. Another army came from the territory of the Tʿetalkʿ and put the Arabs to the sword.[32] The survivors could not get back through the pass. A few escaped over the Caucasus and reached Ctesiphon naked and on foot.[33]

The defeat belongs to late spring or early summer 655.[34] Here the name Tʿetalkʿ stands for a northern people. The likeliest candidates are the Khazars, who were then building their power in the steppe north of the Caucasus.[34] In the east the same name covers the army with which the last Sasanian king, Yazdgird III, took refuge. According to Sebeos, it was the army of the Tʿetalkʿ that seized and killed him.[35]

Reliability

Where the history can be set against other sources of the period, it holds.[36] For Heraclius’ campaigns of 624 to 626 it runs close to Theophanes, and the two may rest on a common source. For those campaigns they do not count as independent witnesses.[37] For the Göktürks, by contrast, his notices stand on their own. Sebeos knew them through Persian affairs, through the career of Smbat and through the passes of the Caucasus. Nothing in the Greek or Chinese record stands behind them.

He gives titles where the Greek historians give names and the Chinese give reigns: a great khagan of the north, a Chembukh on the Oxus, a Chepetukh at the Pass of Chor. What he adds is the view from Armenia in the middle of the seventh century, from the Persian side of the frontier, of one power that reached from the Oxus to the Caspian gates.

References

  1. ^ a b Howard-Johnston 1999, xi
  2. ^ a b Howard-Johnston 1999, lxi
  3. ^ a b c Howard-Johnston 1999, xxxi
  4. ^ Howard-Johnston 1999, xxxiv
  5. ^ Howard-Johnston 1999, xxxvii
  6. ^ Howard-Johnston 1999, xxxvi
  7. ^ Howard-Johnston 1999, xxxiv, xxxviii
  8. ^ Howard-Johnston 1999, xxxv
  9. ^ Howard-Johnston 1999, lxiv
  10. ^ Howard-Johnston 1999, lxiii–lxv
  11. ^ Howard-Johnston 1999, lxvii
  12. ^ a b c Sebeos, ch. 28
  13. ^ Howard-Johnston 1999, p. 185
  14. ^ Howard-Johnston 1999, p. 149
  15. ^ a b Sebeos, ch. 10
  16. ^ a b Sebeos, ch. 10
  17. ^ Howard-Johnston 1999, p. 15
  18. ^ a b Sebeos, ch. 28
  19. ^ Howard-Johnston 1999, p. 50
  20. ^ Macler 1904, p. 49
  21. ^ Howard-Johnston 1999, p. 51
  22. ^ Howard-Johnston 1999, p. 187
  23. ^ Chavannes 1903, p. 251
  24. ^ Howard-Johnston 1999, p. 184
  25. ^ a b Sebeos, ch. 29
  26. ^ Yavuz 2025, p. 359
  27. ^ a b c d Howard-Johnston 1999, p. 54
  28. ^ Howard-Johnston 1999, p. 148
  29. ^ Macler 1904, p. 52
  30. ^ a b Howard-Johnston 1999, p. 188
  31. ^ Sebeos, ch. 7
  32. ^ a b Sebeos, ch. 51
  33. ^ Sebeos, ch. 51
  34. ^ a b Howard-Johnston 1999, p. 278
  35. ^ Sebeos, ch. 48
  36. ^ Howard-Johnston 1999, lxxiv
  37. ^ Howard-Johnston 1999, lxxv

Sources

  • Sebeos, chs. 7, 10, 28, 29, 48, 51

Literature

  • R. W. Thomson (trans.), James Howard-Johnston (commentary), The Armenian History attributed to Sebeos (1999)
  • Frédéric Macler (trans.), Histoire d'Héraclius par l'évêque Sebêos (1904)
  • Robert Bedrosian (trans.), Sebeos' History (1985)
  • Édouard Chavannes, Documents sur les Tou-Kiue (Turcs) occidentaux (1903)
  • Emre-E. Yavuz, The Gokturk Empire: 2nd Edition (2025)

Articles resting on this source 21

Arab–Khazar Wars (642–737) · Badghis · Bahram Chobin · Chepetukh · Derbent · Göktürk Expansion along the Silk Road · Göktürk–Persian war, 588–589 · Great Khan · Gurgan · Hormizd IV · Istemi · Kayen · Khorasan · Murder of Bahram Chobin · Oxus · Paikent · Shegui Khan · Smbat Bagratuni's war with the khan · The Caucasus campaign, 627–629 · Tong Yabgu · Western Göktürk Khaganate

Related

What links here15

Persons
Bahram Chobin · Hormizd IV · Istemi · Kayen
Conflicts
Göktürk Expansion along the Silk Road · Göktürk–Persian war, 588–589 · The Caucasus campaign, 627–629
Battles & Events
Smbat Bagratuni's war with the khan
Places
Badghis · Gurgan · Khorasan
Institutions and Titles
Chepetukh · Great Khan
Sources
Tabari · Theophanes the Confessor

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Sebeos.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/sources/sebeos/

Last revised: 8 November 2026