actors: "The Kingdoms of Ararat, Minni, and Ashchenaz." (Jer. li. 27.) After Dikran's death his son Vahakn succeeded him; he was considered a god by the people, and worshiped as such through a monument after his death. Thus far the people had mostly worshiped the one true God, but from this time they relapsed into heathenism for a while on account of the influences pressing on them from outside. The last king of the Haigazian Dynasty was Vahe. When Alexander the Great invaded Persia, Vahe went to Darius' help with 40,000 infantry and 7,000 cavalry; but Alexander conquered first Darius and then Vahe (328 B.C.), and annexed both Persia and Armenia. Thus came to an end the first Armenian dynasty, after an existence of 1922 years. ARSHAGOONIAN OR ARSACID DYNASTY. This dynasty began not far from 150 B.C.,--close to the time when Carthage was utterly destroyed, and Greece was finally subjugated; it ended 428 A.D., about half a century before the extinction of the Western Roman Empire, and about the time Genseric and his Vandals conquered Africa. It is by far the most famous of the Armenian royal houses; for it embraces the very heart of the classic times with which all educated people are familiar, it brings us perpetually in contact with the most brilliant and best-known of classic names, it is sprinkled itself with names towering up familiar and powerful, even among the Greek and Roman magnates; and, in spite of political ups and downs, it covers a time of immense expansion for the Armenian people, of a firmly rooted growth in numbers, wealth, and consciousness of national unity, which has enabled the nation to survive and keep its united being through many centuries of dismemberment, impoverishment, massacre, and attempts at outright extermination again and again. More than all, it covers the time of Jesus Christ, and the conversion of Armenia to his religion, first of all the nations of the earth, as by its history and traditions it ought to have been. During the time between the disappearance of the line of Haig and the rise of the line of Arshag, Armenia was not by any means wholly without kings of its own; but it was mostly a dependency.