The subjects of funeral songs were the life of the deceased, his stature, the manner of his death, and his domestic relations, so that a collection of these songs would furnish a biography. We have also details of these dirges from other sources. The song opens with a prologue, addressing the deceased and calling on him to arise from his slumbers and carry on his usual occupations. It then goes on to rebuke him for being deaf to the prayers of the survivors and vouchsafing neither word nor smile. Next comes a description of the new dwelling that the departed has chosen for himself; the grave—an abode without doors or windows. Then comes a repetition of the words spoken by the dead man during his last illness, followed by a series of laudatory epithets, and finally there is the recognition that all prayers for his recovery have been unanswered, followed by an epilogue, taking farewell of the deceased and sending messages by him to dead relatives and friends. We learn from Moses of Khorene that, in his time, besides the epics, there was other pre-Christian Armenian literature, written and unwritten, of various kinds. We have had examples of songs and epical stories in their gradual development from the stage when man was weak and ignorant, when the people sought after the supernatural and the marvellous, and the subject of epic songs was the mystic relation between nature and man, to the stage when the heroes are no longer gods, but men endowed with valour and every other virtue, without spot or flaw. The stories we have described are sufficient to prove that Armenia had a large store of epic and heroic poems, of which unhappily only fragments have come down to us. Some specimens of other branches of pre-Christian literature figuring in the list of Moses of Khorene are Temple Books and Histories of Temples. Throughout ancient times members of the priestly class were the chroniclers of the nation’s history and its instructors in wisdom; and there is no doubt that this was the case in Armenia. We know that the famous Gnosticos Bardazan, in the second century A.D., came to Armenia to collect material for his history, and in the fortress of Ani he made extracts from the Temple History, which was a chronicle of the doings of the Armenian kings. Armenia had its own written histories which were, for the most part, destroyed on the introduction of Christianity in the fourth century A.D. Moses of Khorene mentions an Armenian historian named Ughup, who was a priest presiding over the temple of Ani in 150 B.C. To continue the list—we find Books of the Kings, containing chronicles of kings and their works, and Collections of Historical Songs, which were kept in the temples. These collections were in existence in the fifth century A.D. Moses of Khorene gives extracts from them and they were also sung by minstrels. Tueliatz Songs recounted the doings of kings and princes in chronological order, hence their name, Tueliatz, or chronicles.