Edge of Empires

A History of Georgia

Donald Rayfield

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781780230702
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, Georgia is a country of rainforests and swamps, snow and glaciers, and semi-arid plains. It has ski resorts and mineral springs, monuments and an oil pipeline. It also has one of the longest and most turbulent histories in the Christian or Near Eastern world, but no comprehensive, up-to-date account has been written about this little-known country—until now. Remedying this omission, Donald Rayfield accesses a mass of new material from recently opened archives to tell Georgia's absorbing story.Beginning with the first intimations of the existence of Georgians in ancient Anatolia and ending with the volatile presidency of Mikheil Saakashvili, Rayfield deals with the country's internal politics and swings between disintegration and unity, and divulges Georgia's complex struggles with the empires that have tried to control, fragment, or even destroy it. He describes the country's conflicts with Xenophon's Greeks, Arabs, invading Turks, the Crusades, Genghis Khan, the Persian Empire, the Russian Empire, and Soviet totalitarianism. A wide-ranging examination of this small but colorful country, its dramatic state-building, and its tragic political mistakes, Edge of Empires draws our eyes to this often overlooked nation.

1

THE EMERGENCE OF THE KARTVELIANS

THE ORIGINS OF THE GEORGIAN PEOPLE(S), THEIR ETHNOgenesis, like that of most nations, precedes documentary evidence. It is a subject where conjecture and wishful thinking have played a greater part than science or logic. One source for conjecture is linguistic: the Georgian language carries traces of its contacts and substrata over many centuries, possibly millennia; place names give clues to the languages spoken by previous inhabitants of an area. Archaeology also sheds light on early history, and can be eloquent about culture, about population levels and dates, but it cannot reliably identify the ethnic, let alone the linguistic affiliation of relicts of human activity. Finally, from the second millennium BC we have terse, sparse, but often precise, records in clay and stone of the Assyrian, Hittite and Urartu empires of Anatolia, which list hostile, conquered and vassal neighbours and give material from which the existence of the precursors of today’s Kartvelians (Georgians, Mingrelians, Laz and Svans) can be deduced. From the middle of the first millennium BC, more extensive narrative accounts of the inhabitants of northeast Anatolia and western Georgia (Colchis) are provided by Greek historians and geographers, but the chronology is blurred, as are the lines between observation, legend and rumour.¹

The oldest linguistic evidence lies in the modern Kartvelian languages: basic items of vocabulary, such as mk’erdi, chest; k’udi, tail; tbili, warm; zghmart’li, medlar; rka, horn; krcxila, hornbeam; p’iri, face; ekvsi, six; shvidi, seven; trevs, drags, suggest links to an Indo-European dialect with a consonant system reminiscent of the Italo-Celtic group from which Latin derives.² Furthermore, names of ‘noble’ animals – those hunted by the aristocracy such as deer and boar – seem to have Indo-European origins: this phenomenon resembles the Norman element in English, or the Magyar element in Hungarian, implying an invasion of a settled community by an alien aristocracy and its language. Georgian also has grammatical features, in noun declension and verb morphology expressing tense and mood, which resemble Indo-European. These similarities are found in Svan, too, and since Svan broke off from Proto-Kartvelian millennia ago, the Indo-European element in Georgian must be ancient: it may coincide with the movement of Indo-Europeans from the Balkans into Anatolia three to four thousand years ago. (Subsequently, Georgian has borrowed extensively from neighbouring Indo-European languages, notably Old, Middle and Modern Persian,³ but this process can be dated precisely.) Another non-Indo-European origin which are also found in classical Greek: the Kartvelian languages communed with the pre-Indo-European Mediterranean world.

We have evidence to associate the Georgians, after the fall of the Hittites, with the Urartu empire that dominated central and northeast Anatolia from the early Bronze Age (about 1200 BC) to the early Iron Age (about 700 BC). It is uncertain which kingdoms or tribal confederations in conflict or contact with Urartu included Kartvelians, but the peoples known for four hundred years to the Assyrians and Urartu as Mushki, Diauhi, Uiteruhi and Karduhi are relevant. The consonants m-s-k(h) figure even today in the Meskhi, a southern group of Georgians, now entirely Turkish-speaking; fifteen hundred years ago (and recently in Dagestan) Meskhi or Moskhi denoted Georgians as a whole. The Georgian southern province Samtskhe means ‘land of the Meskhi’, and Mtskheta, the capital city from around 300 BC to AD 500, ‘city of the Meskhi’. Mushki are reported c. 1100 BC by the Assyrian king Tiglathpileser in southeast Anatolia: after their defeat they may have moved north. Greek writers later locate the Moskhi in the mountains south of Trebizond. Mushki / Meskhi also seem to refer specifically to eastern Georgia (Iberia or Kartli), which emerged as a state around 300 BC, when the Kura valley tribes coalesced into a kingdom. The pre-Christian religion around Mtskheta worshipped a moon-god Armaz, and a god of fertility, Zaden, showing continuity with Hittite, Hurrite and Urartu religions. Nevertheless, ‘mushki’, ‘moskhi’ and ‘meskhi’ may be ‘floating terms’, just as the word Welsh in Czech denotes Italian and in Bulgarian, Romanian.

Central Georgia in the Kura basin was first known as Iberia. Iberia has been derived from the Phoenician ‘ebr, meaning ‘over there’, or explained as a typical parallel in antiquity, where countries on the eastern known world bear the same names as countries in the west, e.g. Albania in the Balkans, and Caucasian Albania (on the north side of the lower Kura, in today’s Azerbaijan). Iberian more probably derives from Speri, a people of northeast Anatolia known to Herodotus as ‘Sasperi’;⁴ from Speri comes the Armenian for Georgians, (i)virk‘. The modern term ‘Georgian’ is a contamination of Persian / Turkish Gurji, itself drawn from Armenian virk‘, with the cult of St George popular among Georgians, whether pagan or Christian.

The names of certain peoples and areas of interest to Urartu are perpetuated in the names of modern Georgian provinces: from the term Diauhi in the Hurrite language of Unartu it is reasonable to derive Georgian T’ao (Armenian Tayk‘ – the Urartu suffix -hi denotes ‘people’, the Armenian k‘, plurality), a southern Georgian province now in Turkey; from the term Zabahae Javakheti (Armenian Javakhk‘), the southeast borderland of Armenia and Georgia; from Sheshet today’s Georgian district of Shavsheti.

Another possibly Urartu people, first mentioned by the Greeks, are the Karduhi. To ‘Kardu-’ has been attributed the Georgians’ self-appellation, ‘kartveli’. More probably, however, ‘kart’ is cognate with Indo-European ‘gard’ and denotes the people who live in fortified citadels,⁵ as the Georgians did in settlements around Mtskheta.

Despite historical links with Urartu, little of Urartu’s language is reflected in Kartvelian. The only notable term, qira, found in Georgian in idioms to do with up-ending or diving, may be related to Urartu, qi(u)ra, ground. The refrain of a Georgian harvest song, Ivri-arali, tari-arali, ariarali, may be an Urartu invocation to the god of fruitfulness: ‘Lord Arale, mighty Arale, give, o Arale’.⁶ The Georgian (and Armenian) word for eagle, arc’ivi, is found in Urartu, but this is a widespread Indo-European and Hittite lexeme. (Likewise, Armenian, an Indo-European language which has equally perplexing relations to Urartu, has few words traceable to Urartu, whose yoke evidently lay easy on its neighbours’ and vassals’ languages.)

When Georgia emerged from legend into history it did so as two, possibly three, distinct entities. One is the core of the future unified state, Iberia (today’s Kartli and Kakhetia), primarily the country east of the Likhi mountain range that divides rivers flowing into the Caspian (for example, the Kura) from rivers flowing into the Black Sea (the Rioni and the Çoruh). The second is Colchis, the Black Sea coast region that at its greatest stretched from east of Trebizond to north of today’s Sukhumi, and whose border with Iberia in the Likhi mountains has fluctuated only slightly. The third is Svanetia, ancient Suania, which two or three thousand years ago was more extensive than today’s landlocked highlands. Svanetia then reached the coast, and was at times subject to Colchis or Iberia (and their overlords), or divided, or autonomous. Greek geographers and the fact that the Svan language still has idioms figuring masts and sails testify that the Svans were once a maritime people, presumably peopling the Kodori estuary.

Colchis is mentioned as a kingdom long before Iberia: Urartu had to deal with an often powerful ‘Qulha’ on its northern boundaries. How Kartvelian a kingdom, or tribal federation it was, we do not know. By the sixth century BC, to judge by the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, and by archaeological data, Greek trading colonies dotted the Colchis coast, from the Caucasus down to Trabzon (the Hellenic Trapezunt or Trebizond). In north Colchis a confederation of tribes kept its independence and even coherence, and there were towns inland from the Greek ports. One, about ten miles up the river Rioni in today’s Poti, was allegedly called Aia. (Aia may be a back-formation from the legendary King Æëtes; in Homer Aia is Circe’s island; later it denoted all Colchis, or just ancient Kutaisi.) Another Colchian city is known as Archaeopolis, now Nokalakevi, the site of extensive excavations today:⁷ locally it was Tsikheguji, or the fortress of (King) Kuji; a third, near today’s Kutaisi, was known as Rhodopolis (Georgian Vardis-tsikhe is a calque of the Greek). A major religious and political site, dating from the 8th century BC, was Vani, in central Colchis.

Hippocratic doctors warned Greeks against the dangers of the Colchian marshes, with their endemic goitre and malaria (hence the Colchians’ unhealthy squatness and swarthiness), but morbid heat and humidity also made Colchis fertile and prosperous. Colchis was already notable for its linen and other exports, although at first its currency was not coinage, but bronze rings in multiples of 8.2 kilograms (similar to Assyrian standard weights). Little is known of how the Kartvelian and non-Kartvelian indigenous inhabitants of northern Colchis organized their affairs. King Æëtes may have been a historical personage, for as late as the second century AD Arrian, touring Colchis on behalf of the emperor Hadrian, reported seeing sites and ruins from Æëtes’ time, while Pliny the Elder asserts that a descendant of Æëtes, King Saulaces, initiated gold-mining in Colchis (the Scythian name Saulakou appears on a second-century BC coin).⁸

No Colchian king has a Kartvelian name: Kuji, dated by Georgian chroniclers to the third century BC, has a name that means ‘wolf’ in Abkhaz. Æëtes, the legendary father of Medea in Greek myth, may possibly be Abkhaz (Khait’, god of the seas). Later, in the second and first centuries BC we have Aristarchos and Saulaces – Greek and Iranian respectively. As for Colchis’s indigenous name, Mingrelia (Georgian: Samegrelo), the Georgian root is egr. This we find in the classical Georgian name for Colchis, ‘Egrisi’, and corresponds to the Mingrelian names of peoples identified by Xenophon and Herodotus as ‘marg’. The word Colchis may be derived from the ancient southwest province of Georgia Kola, with the Urartu suffix -hi indicating ‘people’. Another Kartvelian group mentioned by Roman writers, when Colchis became known as Lazica, are the Laz. The term Laz derives from the Svan ‘la-zan’ meaning ‘country of the Zan (Laz)’.

Greek and Roman geographers assert that between 70 and 300 languages were spoken in Dioscourias (later Sebastopolis, then Tskhumi now Sukhumi); Colchis seems by the first century BC to be split into a northern, Hellenized state and a southern heterogeneous tribal confederation (for some time under Persian hegemony); Colchis was subsequently known as Lazica, then Egrisi, then Abkhazeti. It must have been ethnically diverse, and its tribes, when they coagulated into a confederation, led by an Abkhaz, Zan (Mingrelian or Laz), Svan or Scythian ruler, or someone from an ethnos now extinct. By 500 BC the prosperous Greek coastal towns, Phasis (founded by Themistagoras of Miletus, near today’s Poti, but by a large harbour since silted up), Gyēnos (near today’s Ochamchira) and Dioscourias (today’s Sukhumi) had economic, if not political, power over the indigenous inland centres of Rhodopolis, Tsikheguji and Vani (known to the Greeks as Souris).

Greek sources are sparse; some merely cite lost geographical treatises. Assyria and Urartu record only battles and victories; the earliest hint of the complexity of Colchis comes from the Assyrian king Tukulti-Nimuri I (1245–1209 BC) who records ‘40 kings by the Upper [Black] Sea’. Archaeology tells us little: Dioscourias lies either underwater or under today’s Sukhumi, while Gyēnos (apparently half-underground) and ancient Phasis are still unlocated. Most Colchian cities, built of wood, were destroyed in the Bosphoran king Pharnakes’ invasion from the north in 49 BC and the Pergamonian king Mithridates’ attack from the west in 47 BC. Relations between Greek colonists (who never founded a state in the eastern Black Sea) and Colchians were generally peaceful, except in Dioscourias, where ethnic tensions were acute, and a fourth century BC bronze stele refers to armed forces. The Greek settlements were mostly Miletian, and their temples were usually dedicated to Apollo. Colchian native cities like Vani were centres for the elite, and only gradually Hellenized: Vani’s main temple was dedicated to Leucothea and had its own oracle.

Greek sources speak of a Colchian kingdom, ruled by skeptouchoi (sceptre-bearers), as Iranian provinces were ruled by varanaka (cudgel-bearers): a golden sceptre has been found at one Colchian site. Whether skeptouchoi betokened devolved or disintegrated administration, we do not know. The ethnic make-up of Colchis is also obscure: Phasis may, like Apsari in the south, contain the Abkhaz root -psa-, ‘water’. Kartvelian affiliation is conspicuously absent from the few anthroponyms found in Colchian burials: Metos, Otoios, Dedatos, Mikakados, Mēlabēs, Chorsip, Orazo are Greek, Anatolian and Iranian.

The origins of eastern Georgia (Iberia, or Kartli and Kakhetia) are equally obscure, but the early Georgian chronicles, compiled between the eighth and eleventh centuries AD possibly from lost early records, as well as from oral tradition, provide a narrative in which myth evolves into plausible legend and finally into verifiable fact. Like many European nations, the Iberians have a ‘Remus and Romulus’, or ‘Lech and Czech’ myth: each city has an ancestral founder – Mtskhetos, Odzrqos – descending from a national founder, Kartlos, whose brother is Gaos, ancestor of the Armenians, and who descends from Noah’s great-grandson Togarmah. Not until the fourth century BC, after Alexander the Great invaded Persia, transforming, albeit bypassing Transcaucasia, do the accounts of The Life of Kartli and The Conversion of Kartli leave the realms of fantasy.

Iberia, even more scantily than Colchis, figures in records of Urartu royal conquests and in Xenophon’s Anabasis, as well as stories relayed by Herodotus. We can deduce a little of the eastern Georgians’ early history, and archaeology fills a few gaps. Records of the early Anatolian empires name northern Caucasian peoples earlier, and further west, than the precursors of Transcaucasian Kartvelians. Hittite records (before 1200 BC) mention Kashki in northeast Anatolia: to the Assyrians these were Kashka (with whom King Tiglathpileser warred c. 110 BC), a variant of ‘Kashog’, a later designation of Circassians. The Assyrians list the Abeshla, known to the Greeks as Apsils, today’s Abkhaz, while the Caucasian Albanians (whose capital city in the early Christian period was Bardavi) may be the nation called Parda by the Assyrians. The Hittites record among their vassals and neighbours antecedents of the Armenians: Hayasa and Zukhma (Hayistan is modern Armenia, and Somekhi the Georgian for an Armenian).

Georgia’s archaeological record begins in the Stone Age: the country has been continuously occupied by Homo sapiens for tens of thousands of years. Grain cultivation, cattle-raising, wine-making and metalworking began as early in Transcaucasia as anywhere on earth. Nothing, of course, indicates the language or ethnicity of these prehistoric humans. Burials give minimal anthropological data, with a fluctuation between tall, narrow-skulled northern skeletons and shorter, broader-skulled Anatolian types. As in Britain, DNA testing shows a remarkable stability over thousands of years in the population. Despite historically recorded invasions, changes of language, ethnicity and culture, the DNA of 80 per cent of today’s population typically shows continuity with prehistoric inhabitants.

At the end of the Neolithic, around 1500 BC, burial customs and grave goods like statuettes of gods, particularly in Trialeti, the hills south of Tbilisi, are significantly similar to those in nearby Azerbaijan and Armenia and in the Mesopotamian culture of the Mittani empire and the central Anatol...