A great many K'art'velian élites, including clerics, evaded Islamic rule by migrating to the southwest (e. g., Tao/Tayk', Klarjeti, Shavshet'i, and Javacet'i), an area relatively unscathed by Arab invasion and occupation. The southwest was subsequently transformed into a vibrant center of K'art'velian religion, culture, and literature, and it was through this region that the K'art'velians entered into direct contact with neighboring Byzantium as never before. In this neo-K'artly, as I call it, exiled K'art'velians also came face-to-face with the large Armenian populations already resident in there. The interaction and exchange of ideas between the K'art'velians and Armenians along with the robust influence of Byzantium fueled a brilliant cultural outburst which inserted the K'art'velians more firmly into the Byzantine world and reintroduced the K'art'velians to Armenian ideas as never before. This paved the way for the subsequent unification of the Georgian peoples and lands by a “K'art'velized” branch of the Bagratid house.
It is hardly surprising that neo-K'art'li was also the launching pad for the revival of K'artvelian sovereignty, an undertaking involving the accumulation of lands already in the possession of the Georgians and those areas, including much of K'art'li itself, under Arab jurisdiction. Soon after a disastrous Caucasian uprising in Armenia against the Arabs in 772, a branch of the powerful Armenian Bagratid (Bagratuni) family relocated permanently to neo-K'art'li. His family rapidly acculturating to the mixed Armeno-K'art'velian environment, the Bagratid Ashot I displaced the weak presiding prince of the Guaramid dynasty in 813 and ushered what turned out to be a millennium of Georgian Bagratid rule. In 888 his kinsman Adarnase II resuscitated K'art'velian kingship.
