attempt to sum up the history of Georgia and to proclaim, for one last time, the divine sanction behind the Bagratids". Thus, the Bagratid claim to be descended from the biblical David persisted until the Russian takeover of their thrones in the early 19th century and is even entertained by some surviving Bagrationi today. Parallels Since the King-Prophet David was considered as a model ruler and a symbol of the God-ordained monarchy throughout medieval Western Europe and Eastern Christendom, the Georgian Bagratids were not the only ruling family to claim a link to David. The Carolingians often connected themselves with David, but did not allege to be descended directly from him. As the historian Ivan Biliarsky have conjectured, the Caucasian paradigm of Davidic royalty may have influenced the Old Testament-modeled vision of kingship in early medieval Bulgaria, the country then in transition from an ethnic pagan state to a Christian empire, as evident in the case of Tsar Izot, cited in the Narration of Isaiah, the so-called Bulgarian Apocryphal Chronicle of the Eleventh Century. The closest parallel to the Georgian Bagratid experience is that of Ethiopia. The medieval Ethiopian historical work Kebra Nagast claims that the Ethiopian rulers were the direct descendants of the biblical Solomon's first born, Menelik. The Georgian and Ethiopian dynasties may have been aware of each other's claims; the Georgian Bagrationi prince Ioann in his didactic encyclopedic novel Kalmasoba, written between 1817 and 1828, cites a 1787 letter sent by the Ethiopian emperor—"also descended from David the Prophet"—to Ioann's grandfather, King Heraclius II of Georgia, in which the Georgian monarch was reportedly addressed by his Ethiopian counterpart as "a beloved brother and the one related through the common bloodline". Modern interpretations The Bagrationi's Hebrew or Davidic origin is considered by modern scholarship as purely legendary forged by the Georgian dynasty early in their history to help assert their legitimacy. The family's alleged Hebrew provenance was utilized and elaborated by the Georgian Bagratids to claim the descent from the divinely appointed model biblical king David, himself a descendant, in an unbroken line, of Adam and the ancestor of Jesus Christ, at the same time obscuring the dynasty's true origin and blood-ties with Armenian cousins. These claims became articulated in the medieval Georgian texts, especially in the chronicle by Sumbat Davitis-dze, himself a purported Bagratid. Moreover, Sumbat erroneously or purposefully presented the earlier, pre-Bagratid Guaramid dynasty of Kartli