WHEN the waters of the Flood subsided. God brought the Ark to rest upon the slopes of Ararat; and Armenia, thus chosen to be the cradle of Mankind, remained for numberless centuries the centre of the Ancient World. From its mountains rivers flowed into Persia on the East, into Asia Minor on the West, and into Syria and Mesopotamia on the South, and up their courses came the thought of the Ancient World, Persian, Greek and Aramaic. In the Armenian market-towns these ideas might quarrel and clash, just as the Roman and Persian monarchs fought to secure the allegiance of their princes. In the more distant valleys where feudal lords reigned over a simple peasantry, they would develop undisturbed, to emerge upon the world again when the people of the valleys grew too many for their narrowness and overflowed abroad.

Christianity soon reached the Armenian highlands. The saints to whom the conversion of the country is officially due, Gregory the Illuminator and the martyred princess Rhipsime, lived in the latter half of the third century. Gregory was born at Ashtishat, in. the outh of Armenia, and probably learnt his faith from Antiochene teachers, that is to say, from a school that was still vague in its Christology and still unwilling to accept fully the Logos-Christianity of Alexandria. But Gregory had no wish to found a schismatic church. The great family to which he belonged, its power and wealth enhanced by his prestige, used its influence to spread the orthodox doctrine; and his disciples of the next century, the Catholicus Nerses and Mesrob, the founder of the Armenian alphabet, worked in with St Basil and the orthodox school of Caesarea.