A timely new book attempts the impossible: a history of the Caucasus.
It is a bold historian who writes a history of
the Caucasus, as events of the past week have
made all too clear. The region may not be much
bigger than England and Wales, but its history
involves three unrelated indigenous groups of
people the Abkhaz and Circassians in the
north-westt, the Chechens, Ingush and Dagestanis
in the north-east, the Kartvelians (Georgians,
Mingrelians and Svans) in the south and
representativess of many Eurasian groups
(Iranian, Turkic, Armenian, Semitic, Russian) who
have settled there over the past 2,000 years.
Some forty mutually unintelligible languages, of
which a handful are established literary
languages and several others have only a
precarious recent literary status, are spoken.
Worse for anyone trying to present a coherent
narrative, these disparate peoples have very
different histories, and only two, the Georgians
and Armenians (some would add the Azeris), have a
history of statehood consistent enough to be
retold as one would retell the history of a West
European country. Worst of all, the frequent
ravages of invaders, from Arabs in the seventh
century, Mongols in the thirteenth, Iranians in
the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and
Russians over the past 300 years, have not only
destroyed and driven out whole states and
peoples, but burnt the records of their very
existence. Even the year of death and the place
of burial of the greatest of Caucasian monarchs,
the Georgian Queen Tamar, is uncertain.
Historians of the Caucasus have on the one hand
to have at their command an immeasurable range of
expertise, from archaeology to the folklore of
dozens of different languages, and on the other
the imagination and verve to bridge the gaps in
chronology and in any other verifiable sources.
It is a task that would daunt even the teams that
produce the Cambridge Histories of, say, Russia or India.
<http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article4522162.ece>Link
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Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2008/08/history-of-cucasus.htm>monochrom
at 8/23/2008 12:31:00 PM
