History 15
CHAPTER TWO
History
Of the early history of the Abkhasian race little is known, and little was probably to be known. More than two thousand years since we find them in Greek records inhabiting the narrow strip between the mountains and the sea along the central eastern coast of the Euxine, precisely where later records and the maps of our own day place them. But whence these seem- ing ‘autochthones’ arrived, what the cradle of their infant race, to which of the ‘earth-families’, in German phrase, this little tribe, the highest number of which can never have much exceeded a hundred thousand, belonged, are questions on which the past and the present are alike silent. (William Gifford Palgrave, one-time British Vice-Consul in Sukhum, Essays on Eastern Questions, 1872, p. 256)
Greeks Colonise the Eastern Black Sea Coast
Our story, like many others, begins with the Greeks. Some time in the 8th century bc during the age of colonial expansion, citizens of Miletus set sail on voyages that were to take them to the eastern coast of the Black Sea, not inappropriately styled by Aeschylus for the pre-classical Hellenic world as ‘the earth’s remotest region’.1 Three of the colonies established on Abkhazian territory were Gye:nos (today’s Ochamchira), Dioscurias (later Sev/bastopolis = today’s Aqw’a), and an idyllic spot further north known to the Greeks as ‘The Great Place of Pines’ (Ho Megas Pityous),2 the ac- cusative case-form of the original Greek (viz. Pityounta) providing both the toponym by which the place is best known today (Pitsunda) and the
1 The relevant passage from Prometheus Bound reads: ‘those who inhabit the land of Colchis, the maidens who fear no fight [Amazons], and the Scythian horde residing in the earth’s remotest region bordering Lake Maeotis [Sea of Azov], and Arabia’s martial flower, who are settled in the high-cragged citadel beside the Caucasus’. As reference to Arabia seems somewhat out of place here at line 420, the distinguished conqueror of Mt. Elbrus, Douglas Freshfield (1896.I.4), was tempted to see in this passage a scribal error and sug- gested amending /’Arabías/ to /’Abasías/, which would both give us the more logical ‘Abk- hazia’s martial flower’ and make this the first historical attestation of the toponym. 2 The letter /y/ in Ancient Greek forms is to be articulated like /u/ in French ‘une’. 16 CHAPTER TWO
Georgian designation (Bich’vinta) (for the etymology see Hewitt 1993a).3 The Abkhazians style the spot Amzara, which, as with the Greek, translates as ‘the a- place -ra of pine -mza-’. The Black Sea’s eastern seaboard and the land behind it were named Colchis, with which the whole world is familiar thanks to the myth of Jason and the Argonauts. The demarcation between myth and history has had (and, indeed, often still has) an unfortunate tendency to become obscured in the writings of many commentators in the Caucasus (see, as pointed out in the Preface, Shnirelman 2001), and it is well to stress from the outset that, to quote the Mingrelian scholar Simon Dzhanashia, Colchis was “more a geographical than a political term, and even then with uncertain boundaries” (1988.295), though for the Greek geographer Strabo (64/3 bc-23/4 ad) it extended roughly from Pitsunda to Trebizond (Trabzon) in Turkey (T. Q’aukhchishvili 1957.283). To the east of Colchis lay Iberia, whose other borders Strabo describes as being the Caucasian mountains to the north, Caucasian Albania to the east, and Armenia to the south (T. Q’aukhchishvili 1957.278). This, then, must have been the country of contemporary Georgian speakers, the des- ignation deriving from the Old Armenian phrase /i Virs/ ‘to the Georgians = Georgia’. The genitive plural of this Armenian ethnonym, seen in the phrase /i Vrats/ ‘among the Georgians’, actually seems, though at first glance it might look thoroughly implausible, to have been the source of the English term ‘Georgia(n)’. The reasoning is as follows: the Persians could not articulate the consonant-complex -vr- and transformed it to produce gordzh- (Turkish gürc, Arabic gurz), which Italians4 later trans- posed into ‘Georgia’ and so introduced it to their fellow Europeans (cf. Russian /Gruzija/ ‘Georgia’ and /Gruzin/ ‘Georgian’);5 the word has nothing to do with Georgia’s patron-saint being St. George or the Greek for ‘farmer’ /geo:rgos/, once postulated to have been used to describe this pastoral
3 The article challenges the view that Georgian is the source of the Greek term and its derivatives, as expressed by Temur Todua in the Georgian newspaper lit’erat’uruli sakartve- lo ‘Literary Georgia’ of 10 November 1989, itself in line with such Georgian precedents as: Q’aukhchishvili (1952.321), Ingoroq’va (1954.148), Apakidze (1975.15), and (latterly) Gvant- seladze (1995). 4 The Genoese had trading-posts along the Black Sea coast from the 13th to the 15th century. 5 I owe this etymology to a personal communication from the late Prof. Sir Harold Bailey. That the classical world also named the westernmost territory of mainland Europe Iberia is purely coincidental, the toponym in this instance deriving from the R. Ebro. Rus- sian has the word /gruz/ ‘burden’, and, given the various tensions resulting from Georgians’ anti-Russian sentiments over the years, the Russians have jokingly concluded that /Gruzi- ja/ is a very apt name for the country!