to be identified either with the Tzans, a Kartvelian tribe in the southern Caucasus, or with a Central Asian group living near the Syr Darya river. Nicholas Adontz believed the legend to be "a confusion, prompted by the love of exotic origins, between the ethnicon čen and that of the Georgian Čan-ians (Tzanni) or Lazi... who were settled in the neighbourhood of Taykʻ." He derives the dynasty's name from Georgian mama, meaning father, combined with the Armenian diminutive suffix -ik. This view is shared by Cyril Toumanoff, who describes the Mamikonians as the "immemorial dynasts of Taykʻ." Other Armenian dynasties also claimed foreign royal ancestry: the Bagratunis claimed Davidic descent and the Artsrunis claimed royal Assyrian ancestry. The later-medieval Armenian author Vardan Areveltsi mentions that the Chenkʻ live in the Caucasus near Derbend. One scholar argued in the 1920s that the Chenk''' were a Turkic group that lived by the Syr Darya. Edward Gibbon in his The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire writes that the founder of Mamikonian clan was not Han Chinese but merely from the territory of the Chinese Empire and ascribes a Scythian origin to the clan's founder Mamgon, stating that at the time the borders of the Chinese Empire reached as far west as Sogdiana. Another theory proposes that the family originally immigrated from Bactria (present northern Afghanistan) under the reign of Tiridates II of Armenia. History The Mamikonians feature prominently in the works of most of the classical Armenian historians. Pavstos Buzand speaks highly favorably of the dynasty, while Movses Khorenatsi is noticeably hostile to them and minimizes their role. Under the late Arsacid Kingdom of Armenia, the family occupied a preeminent position among the Armenian noble houses: they were hereditary commanders-in-chief of the army (sparapet) and royal tutors (dayeak) and controlled large domains, including most of Taron and Tayk. The Mamikonians later increased their property further with the death of the last hereditary Patriarch of Armenia, Isaac in ca. 428, when they inherited many Church lands through the marriage of his only daughter to Hamazasp Mamikonian. The family first appears in the early 4th century, although Toumanoff asserts that Mancaeus, who defended Tigranocerta against the Romans in 69 BC, was a member of the dynasty. The first Mamikonian lord, or nakharar, about whom anything certain is known was a certain Vache Mamikonian (fl. 330–339). According to Pavstos Buzand, Vache