a ruler there and became, as Sumbat claims, the forefather of the Bagrationi. Guaram's brother Sahak established himself in Kakheti, while two other brothers, Asam and Varazvard, conquered Kambechani, east of Kakheti, from a Persian governor. Sumbat's genealogy from Adam to King David is based on the Gospel according to Luke (3:32 ff.), while the one from King David to Joseph is borrowed from the Gospel according to Matthew (1:1-16). The source of the genealogy of Cleopas and his descendants is apparently the Roman scholar Eusebius of Caesarea, who, in his Ecclesiastical History, quotes Hegesippus, according to whom, the Romans searched for King David's scions in order to remove from the Hebrew territory the potential pretenders to the throne who would have had the biblical legitimation. By adding Cleopas into the Bagratid genealogy, Sumbat purposefully led the dynasty's ancestry to the God-anointed king of Israel. Thus, Sumbat's work contains the version of the family legend, which became the basis of a dynastic and political ideology, and, in the course of history, influenced the worldview of the Bagrationi dynasty. Other sources Beside the textual sources, the legend of the Bagratids' Davidic origin is possibly enshrined in the stone effigy in low relief from the medieval Georgian monastery of Opiza, in Shavsheti, and now on display at the Art Museum of Georgia in Tbilisi. The sculpture represents a nobleman in an act of offering a church model to Jesus Christ, seated upon a throne, blessing the donor, and accompanied by a man with his hands in a gesture of supplication. Based on the accompanying minimal Georgian inscriptions, the relief is traditionally interpreted by Ekvtime Taqaishvili, Ivane Javakhishvili, and Cyril Toumanoff as a contemporary depiction of the curopalates Ashot I (died 830) with Christ and the biblical King David. Toumanoff, for example, was convinced that here "the allusion to the donor's descent from Our Lord's ancestor and the latter's intercession is unmistakable". A more recent interpretation by the likes as Nodar Shoshiashvili and Wachtang Djobadze, however, suggests identification of the persons in question as a later curopalates Ashot (died 954) and this Ashot's elder brother David (died 937). Furthermore, David Winfield argued that the presence of the six-pointed star in medieval Georgian architecture, such as on the 10th-century church Doliskana, in Klarjeti, alluded to the proposed descent of the Bagrationi from King David, but there is no evidence that this symbol had any