Requests by Circassian exiles to return to the Caucasus began to pour into Russian consulates not long after the expulsion of the community in the mid-1800s. Until the downfall of the Soviet Union in 1991, however, re-migration in any numbers was not feasible. In the early 1990s, however, thousands of Circassians from the Middle East managed to move back, although some later abandoned the effort, discouraged by the poverty of the region. Return migration slowed after the war in Chechnya heated up in the mid 1990s, and was again constricted in the early 2000s by the imposition of restrictive Russian laws. Would-be immigrants must abandon their foreign citizenship and learn the Russian language. Quotas are imposed as well. Local opposition by non-Circassians also inhibits the movement. The “Union of the Slavs,” founded in 1991, seeks to forestall any return, warning others that the Circassian returnees plan to overwhelm the region and then marginalize local Russians. The Union has also fought proposals to increase the autonomy of the existing Circassian-oriented Russian republics, only one of which, Kabardino-Balkaria, actually has a Circassian majority.

Cossacks have long been at the forefront of the anti-Circassian movement. Cossacks—Slavic-speaking people who had adopted the semi-nomadic lifestyle of the steppes—were instrumental in the expansion of the Russian Empire, and the northwestern Caucasus was no exception.  The Kuban Cossack Host, established on the edge of Circassian territory in the late 1700s, figured prominently in the Russo-Turkish (and Russo-Circassian) wars. During this long period, local Cossacks borrowed extensively from their Circassian enemies. Even the uniforms of Kuban (and Terek) Cossacks are a form of the traditional Caucasian garb known as “chokha.” Historical emulation, however, did not entail peaceful coexistence. When the Tsarist government decided to clear out the Circassians in the 1860s, the Cossacks were in the vanguard. Their assaults usually began with the mass theft of horses—according to a local adage, “a Circassian and a horse together cannot be defeated”—and ended with the burning of villages and the expulsion of the people. As a result, Cossack communities acquired some of the best lands in the northwestern Caucasus.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Cossacks themselves became the victims of a fierce “decossackization” program. In an ironic twist, a number of Cossacks fled south from the Kuban region to avoid the purges and ended up assimilating with the Abkhazians, who are closely associated with the Circassians. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Kuban Cossack traditions and identity quickly rebounded. Mounting Circassian activism and return migration immediately after 1991 help provoke the re-militarization of local Cossack contingents, angering and often intimidating the other peoples of the region. According to a 2008 article by Fatima Tlisova, Cossacks now have a privileged position that they use against Circassians activists. Yet Cossack relations with the Abkhazians remain strong. A 2008 YouTube video about the Kuban Cossacks boasts that, “1500 Kuban Cossack volunteers are now serving in aid to Abkhaz freedom.”

Circassian activists have sought to enhance group solidarity by diminishing the differences among the various Circassian sub-groups. The Russian state has long divided the Circassians into four categories: the Kabardins, the Adyghe, the Cherkes, and the Shapsugs. (Three of these terms are reflected in the names of the three “Circassian,” or partly Circassian, Russian Republics: Republic of Adygea, Kabardino-Balkar Republic, and Karachay-Cherkess Republic.) Members of the Circassian community increasingly insist on the ethnonym “Adyghe” for the entire group, and they hope for the eventual unification of the Circassian parts of the three republics. A related movement involves the quest to craft a new literary trans-Circassian language, as currently two standardized official languages, Kabardian and Adyghe proper, co-exist within a broader continuum of local dialects.

The drive for unification encounters a potential snag in the Abazas and especially the Abkhazians. These peoples are historically and linguistically linked to the Circassians, but have generally been regarded as separate groups. Over the past several decades, the general tendency has been to try to fold all of the indigenous peoples of the northwestern Caucasus into one broad ethnic or national formation. More recently, however, tensions have mounted between Circassian and Abkhazian nationalists. Abkhazia is now a self-declared independent country of its own that functions as a client state of Russia, and Russia is seen as the main obstacle to Circassian unification.

A recent article suggests that tensions have arisen between Circassians and Abkhazians over Krasnya Polyana, the main skiing facility of the 2014 Winter Olympics. Some Abkhazian politicians have evidently claimed that Krasnya Polyana is rightfully Abkhazian, while Circassians view it as a monument to their own tragic history, the site of the last major battle in the Russian-Circassian war. In one sense, neither view is fully correct: before the expulsions of the 1860s, the larger Sochi area had been the home of the Ubykhs, the one northwestern Caucasian people to disappear entirely in the diaspora.

Circassian nationalists differ in their ultimate goals. Some demand nothing less than an independent Circassia blanketing the northwestern Caucasus, but others would be content with political and cultural autonomy within the Russian Federation, coupled with a right for members of the diaspora to return. Even these more limited aspirations, however, face long odds. The three nominally Circassian republics all have limited autonomy, two are officially shared with non-Circassian groups, and all include many Russians and other non-indigenous peoples. Such diversity makes for complex local politics, which often devolve into three-way struggles among Russians, Circassians, and Turkic groups such as the Balkars. Russian activists have tried to dismantle the nominally Circassian Republic of Adygea, situated near the middle of Krasnodar Krai. Circassian officials in Adygea subsequently attempted, without success, to annul the immigration quota for Circassian returnees, hoping to bolster their own numbers in the fragile republic.

Although their national ambitions face deep challenges, the Circassian community possesses many resources of its own. The diaspora includes many influential and wealthy persons. The proposed merging of Adygea and Krasnodar Krai, for example, was forestalled in part by the lobbying of Jordanian Circassians. The Circassian internet presence, moreover, is extensive and impressive, conveyed by many websites and YouTube productions. Yet as the lessons of “Virtual Tibet” show, it is extraordinarily difficult to translate internet activism into real political clout when faced with the concerted opposition of a powerful state.

Despite the sophistication of the Circassian outreach program, their cause has hardly penetrated into the consciousness of the global community. I doubt that one person in a thousand in the United States has any knowledge of the Circassian people. But I do anticipate an upsurge in both information and interest as the 2014 Winter Olympics approaches. Circassians view Sochi and especially the ski resort at Krasnya Polyana as the focal points of their tragic history, and they are already denouncing the upcoming “Genocide Olympics.” Sizable demonstrations against the event have occurred in Istanbul and other cities, and more are on the way. Olympic competitions have long served as theaters of political demonstration, and the Sochi event promises to be particularly theatrical.

Protests against the Sochi Olympics will likely draw on historical themes and motifs associated with the Circassian people. Although the Circassians are little-known in the West, that was not always the case. In the late 1800s the group was so famous that it inspired brand names, as we shall see in Monday’s post, the final offering on the Circassians.

Today, despite being a small community of less than 3,000 people, Circassians in Israel manage to maintain their language (as well as cultural and ethnic identity) to a remarkable degree, even compared to the 100,000-strong Circassian community in the neighboring Jordan, where Circassians enjoy high status but many younger people no longer speak Circassian at all. But Circassians in Israel speak Adyge at home, and children continue to acquire the language from their parents. Primary education in the village schools is conducted in Adyge, and the National Circassian Alphabet of Caucasus (developed by the Soviets) is used in teaching. Curiously, much of the primary education in Adyge in Israel was based on the Soviet models; in 1982, the Israeli Ministry of Education published its own Circassian primer based on a Soviet model, complete with such non-Israeli themes as Young Pioneers with their red ties, sledding and snow balls. Hebrew, Arabic and English are also learned at the elementary level in Israeli Circassian schools.

The village of Kfar Kama has its own middle school (Reyhaniye is too small to have its own secondary school, so its pupils go to both Jewish and Arab schools in neighboring settlements). This middle school in Kfar Kama is a veritable melting pot of different languages, as most classes are conducted in whatever language the teacher speaks or whatever language is appropriate for the subject matter. A 2005 article in the Israeli Hebrew-language daily newspaper Haaretz describes the school like this (translation mine):

“Art classes, whose teacher is Jewish, are conducted in Hebrew; classes on the religion of Islam – in Arabic; English classes – in English with explanation in Hebrew, while students speak among themselves in Circassian [i.e. Adyghe]; and the science classes – according to the teachers’ choice. [One of the science teachers] tries to conduct his science classes in Circassian so that the children won’t forget the language. When he is lacking words for scientific concepts, he completes in Hebrew.”

However, maintaining the Adyghe language and culture is becoming increasingly difficult as more and more younger people integrate into the Israeli society through secondary and tertiary schooling, serving in the army (like Jewish Israelis and Israeli Druze, Israeli Circassian men must complete mandatory military service upon reaching the age of majority) and finding jobs outside the community. Some Circassians are even contemplating returning to the Caucasus despite all the ethnic and political problems there.

Another set of problems peculiar to the Circassian community in Israel stems from the fact that they are Muslims. However, they share neither the Arab origin nor the cultural background of the larger Islamic community in the region. For example, the mosques in Circassian villages (see picture on the left) are built in the style of Circassian mosques in the Caucasus, and substantially differ from Arab mosques; the villages themselves are also built in the traditional Circassian style. In such “walled village”, houses are built next to one another to form a protective wall around the settlement. Moreover, since the beginning the Circassians “were not on the best terms with their local Arab neighbors” (according to Hourani 1947, p. 58), largely because of their language, loyalty to the Ottomans, and customs, such as following their traditional law, the Adyge-Habze, to resolve disputes among themselves.

In contrast, Circassian relations with the Jewish community have generally been good since the beginning of the Jewish settlement in Israel. The use of a common language helped; many of the First Aliyah immigrants to the Galilee spoke Russian, as did most of the Circassians in the region. The Circassian community, moreover, fought on the Israeli side during the War of Independence. Since 1948, at the request of the community’s leaders, Circassians must serve in the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). Today, many Circassians are employed in the Israeli security forces, including not only the IDF but also the Israeli Police, the Israeli Border Police, and the Israeli Prison Service. In fact, the percentage of the army recruits among the Circassian community in Israel is relatively high. Yet, despite their loyalty to the State of Israel, many people – including many Jewish Israelis – are barely aware of their existence, let alone of their unique ethnic and cultural heritage. As a result, Circassians have become subject to discrimination and general anti-Muslim sentiment. For example, Jalal Nafso, the head of City Council in Kfar Kama is quoted in the Haaretz as saying:

“[young people] see soldiers and officers who have been discharged, and what is waiting for them? Do they get appointed to government jobs? No. Why? Because their names are Jalal.”

But despite all the problems, Israeli Circassians are a great example of successfully solving the problem facing many minority groups world-wide: how to balance their national and ethnic identities. Overall, Israeli Circassians manage to maintain a distinct ethnic identity (as can be seen in this YouTube video, which features an interview with an Israeli Circassian imam, Sheikh Farok Zinadin, as well as traditional dances performed by Circassian youth); yet, they also participate in Israel’s economic and national affairs without assimilating fully either into Jewish society or into the Arab Muslim community. Most certainly, other minority groups including Circassian diasporic communities, have much to learn from Israeli Circassians.

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Hourani, A. H. (1947) Minorities in the Arab World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Two problems quickly become apparent when such ethno-demographic data are considered. First, while most ethnic groups used for census data gathering are defined in terms of the languages they speak, several groups are not, most notably the Turkic-speaking Greeks and the mostly Russian-speaking Jews, Germans and Gypsies. A more intractable problem concerns the groups speaking Northwest Caucasian languages: various sources use the terms “Adyghe”, “Cherkess”, “Circassian”, “Kabardin”, “Shapsug” in different yet overlapping ways. For example, the 2002 census listing for Krasnodar Krai specifies in a footnote that the term “Adyghe” is meant to include “Adygeis, Kabardians, Cherkess, and Shapsug” (the original Russian terminology is adygi for ‘Adyghe’ and adygejcy for ‘Adygeis’). The UNESCO list of endangered languages lists Adyghe separately, while grouping Kabardian and Cherkess into one “Kabard-Cherkes” language (incidentally, both of these are listed as “vulnerable” meaning that children speak the language but for the most part only at home). Some sources use “Cherkess” and “Adyghe” interchangeably; yet, other sources use “Cherkess” or “Circassian” as an umbrella term for all Northwest-Caucasian-speaking groups.

The origins of these terms help explain their confused usage today. Adyghe is the autonym (self-designation) of the group. Moreover, Kabardins refer to themselves as Kebertei or Kebertei-Adyghe, and Shapsugs use Shapsyg-Adyghe. In contrast, the term Circassian is the exonym by which speakers of Northwest Caucasian languages are most commonly known to the outside world. It derives from the Turkic designation “Cherkess” that has been adopted by Russian and other languages and became fixed in the European and Asian literatures.

Curiously, the linguistic classification of Northwest Caucasian languages correlates closely with the self-designations of these groups. As the alternative name of this family, Abkhazo-Adygean, indicates, it consists of two main subfamilies: Abkhazian and Adygean. The latter includes two literary languages, Adyghe and Kabardian, and their local dialects (e.g. Shapsug, Temirgoy, and Abadzakh are properly considered dialects of Adyghe). These two languages exhibit close affinity to each other, and some scholars consider them to form a dialect continuum, meaning that some local dialects occupy an intermediate position between the literary standards of Adyghe and Kabardian (for example, the Beslenei dialect is closer to Kabardian except its pronunciation of consonants is more Adyghe-like). This high degree of similarity between Adyghe and Kabardian means that the two languages share a relatively recent common ancestor; indeed, we learn from historical sources that the split between the two subgroups of the Adyghe people happened about 1,500 years ago. Today, Adyghe is spoken by approximately 500,000 people in Turkey, Russia, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Israel, Macedonia, and in the United States (there is even Circassian Association of California). Its closest relative, Kabardian, has about 1,600,000 speakers in Turkey, Russia, Jordan, Syria, and Germany. To avoid further confusion, in what follows I will use the term Circassian as an umbrella designation for Adyghe and Kabardians, but not for the rest of the Northwest Caucasian groups.

The second branch of the Northwest Caucasian language family, the Abkhaz–Abaza branch consists of two languages: Abaza (with 48,000 speakers in Russia and Turkey) and Abkhaz (with 117,000 speakers mostly in the Great Caucasus Mountain range in Abkhazia, as well as in smaller communities in Turkey). The fifth Northwest Caucasian language, Ubykh, now extinct, was once spoken in the area around Sochi in Russia. After the expulsions in 1864, Ubykh was mostly spoken in the Istanbul area, near the Sea of Marmara, but its use gradually declined and its last fully competent speaker Tevfik Esenç died on October 7, 1992. The ethnic Ubykh community now speaks a distinct dialect of Adyghe, according to the Ethnologue website.

Among the linguistic peculiarities of the Northwest Caucasian languages, including Adyghe, is the relative paucity of vowels coupled with the abundance and complexity of consonants. Depending on the analysis, Northwest Caucasian languages have just 2 or 3 vowels, but to compensate for the shortage of vowels, they have very rich systems of consonants. Adyghe and Kabardian actually have the simplest consonantal inventories of the five Northwest Caucasian languages. For example, Kabardian features a “mere” 48 consonants, including some rather unusual ejective fricatives, pharyngeals (i.e. sounds articulated with the root of the tongue against the pharynx, at the back of the throat) and interdentals (i.e. “th”-sounds). Ubykh, on the other hand, had one of the largest consonant inventories in the world, and probably the largest outside the Khoisan languages – a whopping 81 consonants (according to some analyses).

How does a language end up with such a skewed ratio of consonants to vowels? Historical linguists believe that Northwest Caucasian languages developed so many consonants at the expense of vowels because of a historical change in which vowel features were reassigned to preceding consonants. For example, ancestral */ki/ became /kʲə/, with palatalization (i.e. moving the tongue closer to the roof of the mouth) being reassigned from the vowel /i/ to the consonant /kʲ/; similarly, ancestral */ku/ became /kʷə/, with labialization (i.e. the rounding of lips) similarly reassigned. Note that in both cases, the vowels have been neutralized to a schwa /ə/.

From the grammatical point of view, the most interesting property of the Northwest Caucasian languages, including Adyghe, is their polysynthetiс nature: each verb is marked for agreement with all arguments, not only with subjects (as in more familiar Indo-European languages like English: The children play but The child plays), but also with objects and indirect objects. (Other polysythetic languages around the world include: Wichita, a Caddoan languages spoken in west-central Oklahoma; Nahuatl, an Uto-Aztecan language of central Mexico; Mapudungun, an Araucanian language spoken in central Chile; Nunggubuyu, an Australian aboriginal language from the Gunwingguan family; Chukchi and Koryak, two Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages in northeastern Siberia; Ainu of northern Japan; and Sora, a Munda language spoken in India.)

Since agreement prefixes on the verb encode “who did what to whom”, the systems of noun cases in Northwest Caucasian languages are rather underdeveloped (for instance, Abkhaz distinguishes just two cases, the nominative and the adverbial). More generally, the verb is where the morphosyntactic “action” is centered in these languages, and the verb may include not only agreement prefixes but also locative, directional, reflexive, causative, and other morphemes. In effect, virtually the entire syntactic structure of the sentence can be packed within the verb, as in the following examples of Adyghe verbs:

The polysynthetic nature of verbs coupled with the paucity of cases is rather peculiar to Northwest Caucasian languages; Northeast Caucasian languages, in contrast, place the morphosyntactic “action” on nouns rather than on verbs (i.e. these languages have rich case systems and little to no agreement on verbs), whereas South Caucasian languages combine a relatively rich verbal agreement with relatively rich case systems.

Another notable aspect of Adyghe is its vocabulary. In addition to the core word stock shared with other Northwest Caucasian languages, Adyghe also has a significant number of loanwords (some of which are also shared with other Northwest Caucasian languages, especially with Kabardian). The main sources of such loanwords are Russian, Arabic, Farsi (Persian) and Turkic languages. According to A. K. Shagirov, loanwords from Russian constitute the bulk of the foreign vocabulary in Adyghe, indicating the extent and diversity of contacts between the Russian and the Adyghes. However, unsurprisingly, the Adyghe language of diasporic communities in the former Ottoman lands features many more loanwords from Turkic languages.

Each language source contributed words in certain semantic domains. For example, Russian borrowings include words for everyday objects (Adyghe kastrul ‘pot’, cf. Russian kastrjulja), clothing (Adyghe trusik ‘underpants’, cf. Russian trusiki), foods (Adyghe pičen ‘cookie’, cf. Russian pečenje), construction and engineering terms (Adyghe tormaz ‘breaks’, cf. Russian tormoz), medicine (Adyghe prastud ‘common cold’, cf. Russian prostuda), education, science, culture and sports (Adyghe mestaimenija ‘pronoun’, cf. Russian mestoimenije), government, administration, military and the law (Adyghe zakon ‘law’, cf. Russian zakon). In contrast, many of the Arabic loanwords in Adyghe have to do with Islam and Muslim ethics, traditions and holidays: älah ‘God’, hädžə ‘one who made pilgrimage to Mecca’, din ‘religion, faith’, among others. Some of these Arabic loanwords, and all loanwords from Farsi, are said to have been borrowed into Adyghe via such Turkic languages as Turkish and Crimean Tatar. Turkic-derived vocabulary in Adyghe – borrowed from a variety of languages including Turkish, Tatar, Nogai, Karachai-Balkar, and others – includes words for everyday objects, foods, items of clothing, names of animals and plants, trade and military terms, such as bajäu ‘paint’, ästlän ‘lion’, äjvä ‘quince’, äqšə ‘money’, and many others.

One particularly interesting loanword in Adyghe, mentioned by Shagirov, is the word qazar meaning ‘one who asks too much for his goods and does not reduce the price’. Shagirov relates the etymology of this word to the enthnonym Khazars, a Turkic-speaking group whose territory comprised large portions of the northern Caucasus, including the lands of the Adyghe (see map on the left). It is well-known that Khazars were instrumental in maintaining trade networks between Europe and the East; if the etymology of the Adyghe word qazar proposed by Shagirov is correct, it speaks volumes to the trade relations between the Adyghe and the Khazars.

More generally, both the extent of the loanword vocabulary in Adyghe and the semantic areas in which loanwords are especially common reveal that the contact between the Adyghes and the other groups – the Russians, the Turkic-speaking peoples, the Arabs, and the Iranians – were limited mostly to military conquest, administrative rule, and trade. The grammatical peculiarities of Adyghe and other Northwest Caucasian languages, such as their intricate verbal complexes and the paucity of nominal cases, indicate that the contacts could not have involved much intermarriage, which would have led to more extensive penetration of grammatical features from languages of the other groups.

One would hope that genetic findings would shed more light on the origin of Northwest Caucasian groups and their interactions with their neighbors, especially intermarriage between groups. However, there has been relatively little research into the DNA of Northwest-Caucasian-speaking groups. The paucity of work on this topic is compounded by the confusing terminology, as described above, which makes it hard to figure out exactly which groups were tested for which study. But the overall picture that emerges from studies of Y-DNA by Balanovsky et al. (2011) and by Yunusbayev et al. (2011) is as follows. The most frequent haplogroup among Northwest Caucasian peoples is haplogroup G2a; however, unlike the Ossetians, who are highest in subgroup G2a1-P16 (blue in the map to the left, from Balanovsky et al.), Northwest Caucasian peoples are highest in subgroup G1a3b1-P303 (yellow in the map on the left). This haplogroup seems to be peculiar to them, though it is also found in some European populations. In the Caucasus this haplogroup is highest in the west and its frequency diminishes to the east. Thus, Shapsugs, the westernmost Northwest Caucasian group, have the highest frequency of this haplogroup, over 80%.

The two other haplogroups that are high in the Northwest Caucasian populations are J2a and R1a1. The former, especially its subgroup J2a4b*-M67, is found in about 6%-12% of Northwest Caucasian people (depending on the study and the group), and has the highest frequency among the Ingush, up to 88% (shown in red in the map above). Haplogroup R1a1-M17 is found with the frequency similar to that of J2a – about 6-14% of Northwest Caucasian men have this genetic signature (again, depending on the study and the group). This haplogroup became known as the “Eastern European DNA”; it is also the only haplogroup found in what is thought to be Scythian skeletons from the south Siberian steppes to the northeast of the Caucasus. In fact, Keyser et al. (2009) called this haplogroup the “mark [of] the eastward migration of the early Indo-Europeans”.

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Balanovsky, Oleg; Khadizhat Dibirova; Anna Dybo; Oleg Mudrak; Svetlana Frolova; Elvira Pocheshkhova; Marc Haber; Daniel Platt; Theodore Schurr; Wolfgang Haak; Marina Kuznetsova; Magomed Radzhabov; Olga Balaganskaya; Alexey Romanov; Tatiana Zakharova; David F. Soria Hernanz; Pierre Zalloua; Sergey Koshel; Merritt Ruhlen; Colin Renfrew; R. Spencer Wells; Chris Tyler-Smith; Elena Balanovska; and The Genographic Consortium (2011) Parallel Evolution of Genes and Languages in the Caucasus Region. Molecular Biology and Evolution 28(10): 2905–2920.

Keyser C., Bouakaze C., Crubézy E., Nikolaev V.G., Montagnon D., Reis T., Ludes B. (2009) Ancient DNA provides new insights into the history of south Siberian Kurgan people. Human Genetics 126(3): 395-410. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19449030

Shagirov, A. K. (1962) Essays on comparative lexicology of Adyghean languages. Nalchik: Kabardino-Balkarian Book Publishing. [in Russian]

Shakryl, K. S. (1971) Essays on Abkhaz-Adyghe languages. Sukhumi: Alashara. [in Russian]

Yunusbayev, Bayazit; Mait Metspalu, Mari Järve, Ildus Kutuev, Siiri Rootsi, Ene Metspalu, Doron M. Behar, Kärt Varendi, Hovhannes Sahakyan, Rita Khusainova, Levon Yepiskoposyan, Elza K. Khusnutdinova, Peter A. Underhill, Toomas Kivisild, and Richard Villems. The Caucasus as an asymmetric semipermeable barrier to ancient human migrations. Molecular Biology and Evolution online.

The mass killing of Armenians is not the only example of a politically contested charge of genocide in the Caucasus. In May 2011, the Georgian legislature voted unanimously to classify the Russian assaults on the Circassian (or Adyghe-speaking) community in the 1860s as acts of genocide. The only legislator to speak against the bill warned that it would offend Georgia’s Armenian community, considering the fact that Georgia has not acknowledged the Armenian case. Thus far, Georgia is the only country to officially consider the expulsion and slaughter of the Circassians as a case of genocide. Critics charge Georgia with self-interested behavior, noting that its intractable struggle with Russia over South Ossetia and Abkhazia provides incentive to denounce the past actions of the Russian government in the Caucasus. Hard-core Turkish partisans have also highlighted the Circassian massacres, in their case to downplay the Armenian example; according to one blogger, the Circassian genocide was “infinitely worse than what happened to the Armenians,” yet it has been almost entirely forgotten by the international community.

Controversies surrounding the “genocide” label are often definitional, hinging on whether actions must be consciously aimed to exterminate an entire people to be so classified. Yet regardless of the formal label used, the massacres and evictions of Armenians in the early twentieth century and of Circassians in the mid nineteenth century were horrific. Based on the original definition of the term, the “genocide” label does seem appropriate. Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1943 in reference to the Nazi extermination of the Jews, but he began working on the idea much earlier, in response to the catastrophic expulsions of the Armenians and the massacres of Assyrians in northern Iraq in the 1930s. (Like the Circassian genocide, that of the Assyrians has garnered little international recognition, apart from Sweden in 2010.)

The Russian-Circassian conflict dates back to the mid-1700s, part of a much broader struggle pitting the Russian Empire against the Ottoman Empire. After roughly 100 years of war, the Russian government decided in the early 1860s to drive the Circassians into Ottoman territory. Russian forces and Cossack irregulars systematically burned villages and slaughtered civilians. According to an article posted in the Circassian World website, these actions were “the first intentional large-scale genocide of the modern times. … It was also the largest single genocide of the 19th century.” By most accounts, some ninety percent of the Circassian population was either killed or driven out, effectively depopulating most of the northwestern Caucasus. A few Circassians, especially members of the eastern Kabardin group, were able to remain, and in time their numbers grew. Nonetheless the expulsion was devastating. Of an estimated 3.7 million Circassians worldwide today, only 700,000 live in the homeland. The remainder reside primarily in Turkey and other lands of the former Ottoman Empire, particularly Syria and Jordan.

The depopulation of the northwestern Caucasus in the 1860s is reflected in the modern linguistic map. The distribution of the northwestern Caucasian linguistic family today is markedly discontiguous. Whereas the northeastern Caucasian and the Kartvelian languages (Georgian and its relatives) cover relatively solid blocks of territory, the northwestern Caucasian languages appear in small pockets surrounded by areas in which people speak Russian and other languages. Even in the Russian republics of Karachai-Cherkessia and Adyghea, ostensibly based on Circassian ethnicity, Circassians constitute only about a quarter of the total population. Yet before the events of the 1860s, the Circassians and their relatives had occupied a large block of contiguous territory in the mountains and the adjacent lowlands of the northwestern Caucasus.

The Ottomans generally welcomed the Circassian refugees, valuing their military expertise against the Russian enemy, and hence offered them haven in scattered locales. Yet in their unwilling diaspora, the Circassians have had some difficulty maintaining their language and ethnic identity. This has been particularly true in Turkey, where a politically enforced nationalism has meant categorization as Turks, regardless of self-identity. In the past, many Circassians in Turkey have been willing or even eager to assimilate; a result, the use of northwestern Caucasian languages in the diaspora has declined sharply.  Many younger Circassians in Turkey, however, are now reclaiming their identity. In April 2011, “Circassians in Turkey staged a rally … in Istanbul’s Kadıköy district to demand broadcasting and education rights in their native language…” One participant claimed that “The denials, exiles, betrayals, insults, policies of assimilation and social exclusion that have taken place during the 87 years that have passed since the foundation of the Turkish Republic nearly amount to a gallery of sins.”

According to some sources, Circassian identity has been more easily maintained in Jordan, Syria, and Israel, whether due to the less homogenizing political cultures of these countries or simply to the greater cultural distances separating the Circassians from their majority populations. In 2010 Jordan opened a Circassian academy, featuring classes in Adyghe. Such classes may be a challenge to pull off, however, as even in Jordan relatively few Circassians have preserved their language. In both Jordan and Syria, Circassians have tended to form privileged communities, marked by some political and even military clout, encouraging assimilation in the long run.

The position of the Circassian community in Syria, however, may be in danger. Like the Christians and Alawites, the Circassians have tended to support the al-Assad regime, which—brutal through it may be—has generally kept the lid on sectarian and ethnic strife. Several Circassian leaders in Syria are now seeking permission from Russia for re-migration to the northwestern Caucasus. Such a request reflects both the insecurity of present-day Syria and the lure of the homeland; as Circassian ethnic consciousness grows, many Circassian are concluding that long-term cultural survival is possible only within Circassia itself. Russia, however, has placed firm limits on return migration, angering Circassian activists. As we shall see in a later post, Circassian activism is increasing in Russia, generating concern in the country’s political establishment. Any returnees, moreover, might find disappointment; some of the Jordanian Circassians who recently moved to the Caucasus later returned to Jordan, having discovered that the reality of their homeland and their dreams about it did not coincide.

GeoCurrents will continue to explore the Circassians for the next week or so. The Circassians are of major—although woefully under-appreciated—world historical significance, and they were once well-known in Europe and North America. They may become noted again; Circassian protesters are already gearing up for the Sochi Winter Olympics, situated in what they consider to be the epicenter of their genocide. In winter 2014, the global press may have a few words to say about the forgotten Circassians.

Although the languages of Dagestan include members of the widespread Turkic and Indo-European families, most belong to the Northeastern Caucasus family. Many linguists include the Nakh languages of neighboring Chechnya and Ingushetia in the group; others essentially limit it to languages spoken in Dagestan and the mountains of northern Azerbaijan. Despite its restricted distribution, the NE Caucasian family is deeply differentiated, including six clearly separate subfamilies in addition to Nakh. Three of these groupings (Lezgic, Dargin, and Avar-Andic) include one or two “major” languages, spoken by hundreds of thousands of people, along with an assortment of local tongues used by only a few thousand. According to the Wikipedia, four Dagestani languages (Avar, Dargwa, Lezgin, and Tabasaran) are “literary,” employed to some extent for written communication.

As a remote area with many small ethnolinguistic groups, the northeastern Caucasus is distinctive but hardly unique. Other areas of forbidding topography with similar levels of linguistic diversity include the highlands of New Guinea—a vastly larger area—and the Nuba Mountains of Sudan. Most such areas are assumed to be historical backwaters, but that is not the case in regard to the northeastern Caucasus. If the “Alarodian” hypothesis is correct, two of the most important  peoples of the ancient Near East spoke languages, now long extinct, that were closely linked to the Northeastern Caucasian family.

The ancient languages in question are Hurrian and Urartian. “Hurrian” may not be a household word, but various Hurrian states were rivals of the Babylonians, the Hittites, and other Bronze-Age “super-powers.” The Hittite Empire itself probably included large numbers of Hurrian-speakers, although its official language was Indo-European. The main body of the Hurrians, living in what is now northern Iraq, northeastern Syria, and southeastern Turkey, also seems to have been over-run by Indo-Europeans, chariot-riders who established the powerful Kingdom of Mittani circa 1500 BCE. The Mitanni rulers had Indo-European names, but they soon adopted the Hurrian speech of their subjects, as revealed by the remarkable Amarna Correspondences preserved in Egypt.

The Mitanni Kingdom of the Hurrians disappeared in the conflagration that marked the end of the Bronze Age, circa 1200 BCE, a time of massive population movement, de-urbanization, and the retreat of literacy. By the tenth century BCE, however, a powerful new kingdom using a closely related language emerged in the area around Lake Van in what is now eastern Turkey. This Iron-Age kingdom of Urartu was noted for its mineral wealth and for its bitter rivalry with the Assyrian Empire. Urartu persisted until it was conquered by the Empire of the Medes, the immediate predecessor of the Persian Empire, circa 590 BCE. At roughly the same time, the land of Urartu seems to have been linguistically transformed by the spread of proto-Armenians from the west, a people perhaps linked with the ancient Phrygians who spoke a language in an outlying branch of the Indo-European family. In the twentieth century, Armenian nationalists began to glorify ancient Urartu as the deep font of Armenian culture. In doing so, they sought to highlight the antiquity of their claims to territory in what is now eastern Turkey. Without endorsing such political claims, it is only fair to acknowledge a close historical connection between Urartu and Armenia.

The linkage between NE Caucasian languages and ancient kingdoms is strongest in Caucasian Albania, a state that covered much of what is now Azerbaijan from the fourth century BCE to the eighth century CE. Like Armenia and the Georgian kingdom of Iberia, Albania was politically caught between, and deeply influenced by, the Persian world to its east and the Greco-Roman world to its west. We know from ancient Greek writers that the Albanians eventually acquired their own script, but knowledge of this writing system was lost until 1937. At that time, a Georgian scholar discovered a reproduction of the Albanian alphabet in a medieval Armenian manuscript. Subsequently, a few stone inscriptions were found that used the same script, but the language itself basically remained a mystery until the early 2000s.

The story of the recovery of Albanian writing begins in 1975, when a fire damaged a number of manuscripts in a neglected basement cell in the famous Eastern Orthodox monastery of Saint Catherine’s in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. The heating of the manuscripts helped reveal the fact that some were palimpsests, parchment manuscripts that had been scraped over and then re-inscribed. Fifteen years later, unknown letters were noticed under a Georgian text in one of the documents. In 1996, the Georgian scholar Zaza Alexidze determined that the underlying passages were in Albanian. After several years of concerted effort, he recovered and translated the entire hidden layer of the palimpsest. What he found was an Albanian Christian lectionary, a church calendar with specific scriptural readings keyed to specific dates. Some scholars believe that this long-forgotten and thoroughly erased text, which dates to the late forth or early fifth century, is the oldest Christian lectionary in existence.

Alexidze’s translation was facilitated by the existence of a living tongue strikingly similar to the language used in the lectionary. The literary language of the ancient Albanians, it turns out, lived on among the Udi, a group of eight thousand persons inhabiting two villages in Azerbaijan. As the years passed, the Udi language diverged from old Albanian, but not by much. The surviving Udi people also retained the faith of their ancestors. Although they live in a largely Muslim area, the modern Udi belong to their own Udi-Albanian Christian church.

Christianity originally spread to Albania from Armenia. The Albanian church eventually separated from the Armenian, affiliating instead with the Orthodox Christianity of the Greek world. After the Muslim conquest of Albania in the 600s, such an affiliation became politically fraught, as the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire was the main principal rival of the Muslim Caliphate. As a result, the Albanian Christian population was again placed under the ecclesiastical authority of the Armenian Apostolic Church. Over time, it seems, much or perhaps most of the Albanian population assimilated into the Armenian community. Those who resisted Armenian religious control seem to have evolved into the modern Udi. Yet the Udi population continued to decline, as many members adopted Islam and were absorbed by the Azeri community. Today, the Udi language is regarded as gravely endangered.

As might be expected, the Albanian heritage of the eastern Caucasus has generated a contemporary political controversy among Armenian and Azerbaijani partisans, focusing on the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Eastern Armenians, according to some Azerbaijani stalwarts, are not so much genuine Armenians as transformed Albanians—like much of the Azeri population. Armenian scholars charge Azerbaijani historians with greatly exaggerating the extent of Albanian assimilation, and with trying to “de-Armenianize” much of the historically constituted Armenian region.

To the neutral bystander, the issue might seem moot; ethnic groups and nations often expand by assimilation, and the mixing of peoples is more the norm than the exception over the long term. Primordialist nationalism, however, retains a strong hold on the imagination, especially when faced with intractable military conflicts. As the “frozen war” between Armenia and Azerbaijani is now going into its third decade, it is not surprising that the ancient Albanians would be recruited into the conflict.

The history of the Georgian language reveals some interesting patterns of cross-cultural interaction. Georgian can be traced back to a ancestral language— Proto-Kartvelian—that it shares with its close relatives: Mingrelian, Svan and Laz. Spoken in the second millennium BCE, Proto-Kartvelian must have interacted closely with Proto-Indo-European, the ancestral tongue to most European languages, as well as those of Iran and northern India. This connection is indicated by the so-called ablaut patterns (like the English sing-sang-sung), which Proto-Kartvelian probably borrowed from Proto-Indo-European, alongside many specific words. The most notable among these loanwords is the reconstructed Proto-Kartvelian m_.k_.erd ‘breast’, which is said to be a cognate to the Indo-European kerd ‘heart’ (cf. the Latin cardio—and even the English heart).

While the connection of Georgian to Indo-European languages is solid, if distant, several scholars have searched for linkages to other languages, most notoriously Basque, a non-Indo-European “outlier” language in Europe. To this day, no proven connection has been demonstrated between Basque and any currently spoken languages; as a result,  Basque remains a perfect isolate, an “orphan” language with no ties to any language family. But the idea that Basque might be related to some other languages, in particular Georgian and other  languages of the Caucasus, has ignited a lot of interest among Vasconists (i.e. scholars of Basque) and Caucasianists alike.

The search for a connection between Caucasian languages and Basque dates to the work of Hugo Schuchardt in the early twentieth century. Schuchardt was chiefly interested in finding a North African connection for Basque, but in a 1913 paper he cited some parallels between Basque and the languages of the Caucasus. The Dutch linguist Christian Cornelius Uhlenbeck explored the same connection in a series of papers beginning in the early 1920s (e.g. “De la possibilité d’ une parenté entre le basque et les langues caucasiques”, published in the Revista Internacional de los Estudios Vascos) and continuing through 1940s. The Italian linguist Alberto Trombetti wrote an entire book in 1925 based on a long list of supposed Caucasian-Basque cognates. The Georgian linguist Nikolai Marr published several articles comparing the languages of the Caucasus and Basque, but Marr is now generally considered to have been more a myth-maker than a scientist (in a curious twist of fate, his teachings were declared anti-Marxist in an article published in the Soviet newspaper Pravda under the signature of Joseph Stalin himself, but this article was most likely inspired by the writings of Marr’s most energetic opponent, Arnold Chikobava). The French Indo-Europeanist (and Caucasianist) Georges Dumézil devoted a chapter of his 1933 book to putative cognates found among Basque and the Northern Caucasian languages. René Lafon, a French scholar of Basque, produced a long series of articles, published in 1930s through 1960s, arguing for a Basque-Caucasian link. This idea was further explored by the Norwegian Caucasianist Hans Vogt and the German linguist Karl Bouda, although they achieved very different results: Vogt’s conclusions were largely negative, whereas Bouda is perhaps the most enthusiastic of the proponents of a Caucasian-Basque link. Bouda’s papers from the late 1940s and early 1950s provide a most extensive list of cognates, including some 500 items.

The original inspiration for the Georgian- (or more generally Caucasian-) Basque link came from the existence of the ancient Kingdom of Iberia in the Caucasus (its self-designation was Kartli, hence “Kartvelian”), basically located in present-day eastern Georgia. Another supposed link involves the existence of the Basque place-name ending in -adze, similar to Georgian surnames ending in -dze or -adze (prevalent in western Georgia). (The most common surnames ending in -(a)dze are Kapanadze, Maisuradze and Giorgadze; one may also recall in this connection the names of the former Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze and of the iconic ballet choreographer Giorgi Balanchivadze, better known as George Balanchine.) However, this suffix literally means ‘son’ in Georgian, so the connection to Basque toponyms is hardly substantiated.

As mentioned above, various scholars have proposed a number of putative cognates, but most of them have simply listed Basque words and morphemes that bear a vague resemblance to words and morphemes in one Caucasian language or another (including Georgian). Representative examples include: the Basque word etxe ‘house’ is matched with the word ča ‘hut’ in Lak (Northeast Caucasian); and the Basque ahari  ‘ram’ is matched with words meaning ‘small lamb’ in three Northeast Caucasian languages (Chechen Eaxar, Ingush häxar and Batsbi axrab). Many of the proposed cognates require a leap of imagination to see the sound correspondences at all, as is the case with the Basque haragi ‘meat’ matched with the Circassian l« ‘meat’; the Basque hotz ‘cold’ matched with the Abkhaz s^w ‘freeze’; Basque larri ‘anxious’ matched with Avar erize ‘be afraid,’ and so on. Among the specifically Georgian-Basque cognates that suffer from the same problem is the Georgian bza ‘box tree,’ matched with the Basque ezpel ‘box tree.’ These lists of putative cognates typically pair Basque words with words in some particular Caucasian language (or closely related languages). Yet, these works do not demonstrate a connection between Basque and the ancestral languages of Northwest, Northeast or South Caucasian languages, let alone a connection between Basque and the ancestral language of all Caucasian languages.

And since the search for a Caucasian-Basque link involves some forty Caucasian languages, it is not surprising that some resemblances can be found, if only by chance. Such a possibility is enhanced if one allows rather loose parallels in sound and meaning, as has indeed often been the case.

But the Caucasian-Basque hypothesis was fueled not only by questionable lexical cognates, but also by a number of typological similarities. Georgian, for example, shares with Basque its ergative case system, an elaborate scheme of verbal agreement, as well as such other characteristics as agglutinative morphology, Subject-Object-Verb order, vigesimal number system (base 20), and the presence of distributive numerals. A full discussion of such similarities would be too long and too technical to be included here, but some points of commonality do deserve discussion.

Let us briefly consider the ergative case system shared by Georgian and Basque. In English, word order encodes who did what to whom: John kissed Mary and Mary kissed John differ by who initiated the action and to whom it was applied, which we deduce solely from the word order.  But many, if not most, languages use some overt morphological marking to encode the same thing. Noun case is one such type of marking: in a case language such as Latin or Russian, the equivalents of ‘John kissed Mary’ and ‘Mary kissed John’ differ not so much by word order but by the forms of the nouns ‘John’ and ‘Mary’. In scores of languages, Latin and Russian included, the subject of a sentence – here, the one who did the kissing – appears in one form, called “nominative”, whereas the object – here, the one who is kissed – appears in another form, called “accusative”. Since “who did what to whom” can be deduced from the forms of the nouns, word order in many case languages is much freer than it is in English.

However, not all languages that rely on case use the same nominative-accusative model employed by Latin and Russian. Both Georgian and Basque follow a different model, known as “ergative-absolutive” (after the names of the two main cases). In this model, the subject appears in the so-called “ergative” case – but only if an object is also present. If there is no object, as in for example ‘John left’, the subject appears in a different form called “absolutive”. This latter form is also used for objects.

Here are some illustrative examples from Georgian. In the sentence (1a), which has both a subject and an object (it is thus called a “transitive sentence”), the subject bich’ ‘boy’ is marked with the ergative suffix -ma, and the object dzaghl  ‘dog’ is marked with the absolutive suffix -i. In the sentence (1b), which has a subject but no object (and is thus an “intransitive sentence”), the subject is not marked by the ergative suffix -ma, but rather by the absolutive suffix -i.  In effect, the object in (1a) and the subject in (1b) are in the same form.

(1) Georgian

(1a)

bich’-ma       dzaghl-i       bagh-shi          da-mal-a.

boy-ERG         dog-ABS         garden-DAT-in hid.AOR

‘The boy hid the dog in the garden.’

(1b)

dzaghl-i           bagh-shi                     da-i-mal-a.

dog-ABS         garden-DAT-in            hid.AOR

‘The dog hid in the garden.’

The same thing is true of Basque: the ergative suffix -k attaches to subjects but only if an object is also present (as in (2a)); if there is no object, the subject appears in the absolutive case, which is marked by the absence of the ergative suffix -k.

(2) Basque

(2a)

ehiztari-a-k              otso-a                        harrapatu     du.

hunter-DEF-ERG        wolf-DEF.ABS            caught              has

‘The hunter has caught the wolf.’

(2b)

otso-a                         etorri              da

wolf-DEF.ABS            arrived             is

‘The wolf has arrived.’

But the ergative case system is not the only typological similarity between Georgian and Basque. Both of these languages require its verbs to agree not only with subjects (as in the English I play vs. He plays), but also with objects. Both the ergative case system described above and the pluripersonal agreement (i.e. agreeing with both subjects and objects) appear exotic to a speaker of any major European language, so it is tempting for us to look for a familial connection between Georgian and Basque.

But one particular quirk throws the relationship in doubt. While both Georgian and Basque employ the ergative case model and pluripersonal agreement, only Basque follows the ergative model for its agreement, selecting the same agreement morphemes for intransitive subjects (i.e. subjects that occur with no object in sight) and for objects, whereas agreement with transitive subjects (i.e. subjects that occur with an object in the same sentence) is marked by a different set of morphemes. In contrast, Georgian follows the nominative-accusative model for its agreement: agreement with subjects is marked by one set of morphemes, regardless of whether an object appears in the same sentence or not, while agreement with objects is done by another set of morphemes. In other words, for the purposes of selecting a case suffix, Georgian treats subjects differently depending on whether the object is present or not, whereas for purposes of agreement on the verb, all subjects are created equal. Basque, on the other hand, relies on the ergative-absolutive model more extensively. Thus, the apparent typological resemblance between Georgian and Basque – their ergative case system and the pluripersonal agreement – does not hold up on a closer inspection.

Although the common presence of non-Indo-European grammatical properties (together with putative cognates) has been enough to persuade some linguists that there must be a connection between Georgian and Basque, this is a dangerous assumption, as typological resemblances have rarely been useful in proving common descent from an ancestral language. As a result, most linguists today – including most notably R.L. Trask, Luis Michelena, V.A. Chirikba – reject the idea of a Georgian- (and more generally, Caucasian-) Basque link.

Moreover, genetic studies to date have not found any link between the Basques and the peoples of the Caucasus. For example, Bertorelle et al. (1995) conclude that “a genetic test of this hypothesis, based on classical markers [i.e. blood groups and protein electromorphs], did not show any particular genetic link between Caucasians and Basques”. This conclusion is further supported by the work of Nasidze and Salamatina (1996), who found that “Georgians seem to be genetically differentiated in relation to European populations, again as shown by classical markers”. Nor was mitochondrial DNA any help, as Comas et al. (2000), who studied a 360-base-pair stretch in HVR I of the mtDNA control region, concluded that “the putative linguistic relationship between Caucasian groups and the Basques, another outlier population within Europe for classical genetic markers, is not detected by the analysis of mtDNA sequences”.

The negative findings of modern scholarship have not, however, prevented certain schools of populist nationalism from propounding an “Iberian” theory of pre-history based on the supposed kinship of Basque and Georgian. A website called “Iberia Forever”, dedicated to the “spiritual mission of Georgia”, claims that “According to the latest studies of modern Kartvelologists (Jan Braun, and others), the view is gaining ground on Basque being a fourth Kartvelian language”. Another Georgian site follows the discredited work of Nikolai Marr in arguing that “the Georgians and the Basques (in Spain) are the sole survivors [of the proto-Iberians], though the extinct Etruscans in Italy may have belonged to a kindred family”. Such claims are taken much further in an imaginative YouTube video modestly entitled “Iberian Heritage: Let the Truth Speak for Itself” (see the image to the left).  Such ideas occasionally filter into the mainstream media.  A 2003 Washington Times article, for example, begins by noting that

“It may come as a surprise that the Georgians of the former Soviet Union and the Basques of ancient Iberia, now Spain and Portugal, have a common ancestry, but early Greeks and Romans called those Georgians and Basques Iberians.”

The search for common ancestry among seemingly disparate ethnic groups is understandable, and is beneficial insofar as it draws people to the study of history, geography, linguistics, and genetics. But it is the responsibility of scholars to occasionally throw cold water on fond dreams that do not withstand scrutiny.

******************************

Bertorelle G, Bertranpetit J, Calafell F, Nasidze I, & Barbujani G. (1995) “Do Basque- and Caucasian-speaking populations share non-Indoeuropean ancestors?” European Journal of Human Genetics 3:256–263.

Comas D, Calafell F, Bendukidze N, Fañanás L, & Bertranpetit J (2000) “Georgian and Kurd mtDNA Sequence Analysis Shows a Lack of Correlation Between Languages and Female Genetic Lineages” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 112:5–16.

Nasidze IS, Salamatina NV. (1996) “Genetic characteristics of the Georgian population”. Gene Geogr 10:105–112.

But regardless of the community’s future, its Greek nature raises some interesting issues about identity. Members of the group consider themselves Greek, generally belong to the Greek Orthodox Church, and use the Greek script when writing their own language; they are also reckoned as Greeks by the Athens government. As a result, their homeland has been accurately mapped as “Greek” on ethnic maps. It is a different matter, however, when it comes to linguistic maps, as most of the Greeks of south-central Georgia speak a Turkic language called Urum. They are not unique in this regard. Many of the estimated 1.5 million Greeks expelled from Turkey to Greece in the 1920s were actually Turcophones. Today, the remaining Turkic-speaking Greek population is concentrated in three areas: south-central Georgia, the north Azov area of southern Russia, where the community was reported to be 60,000 strong in 1969, and in Donetsk Oblast in southeastern Ukraine, which Ethnologue claims contains 95,000 Urum speakers.*

The Greek presence in the area that is now Georgia apparently dates to antiquity. The ancient Greeks were a maritime people who established outposts all along the shores of the Black Sea, many of which survived, in one form or another, into the modern era. The focus of this so-called Pontic Greek community was the coastal strip of what is now northeastern Turkey, an area that enjoyed its heyday from 1204-1461 as the Empire of Trebizond, a prosperous and highly cultured Byzantine successor state. After the Ottoman conquest of Trebizond in 1461, some of its Greek residents abandoned Greek for Turkic dialects while remaining Christian and Greek-identified, others retained both Christianity and their distinctive Pontic Greek dialect (or language), others converted to Islam and adopted the Turkish language, and still others became Muslim while continuing to speak “Rumca,” the local term used to denote Pontic Greek.** Those who retained Greek identity tried to build a Republic of Pontus during the chaotic years from the end of World War I until the early 1920s, but were unsuccessful. After repelling the Greek invasion from the west in 1922, the Turkish government of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk established a firm hold over Anatolia. Turkish assaults at this time on the Greek community in the northeast have been deemed by some the “Pontic Genocide”; in the end, most of the Greeks of Turkey were expelled to Greece, just as the Turks of Greece were expelled to Turkey. Today, Trebizond is an ethnically Turkish area described by the BBC in 2007 as a football-mad hotbed of Turkish nationalism.

The Pontic Greeks were not limited to northeastern Anatolia, as hundreds of thousands lived in the coastal areas of what are now Georgia, Abkhazia, southern Russia, and Ukraine. These communities also suffered periodic bouts of persecution in the twentieth century. Under Stalin, as many as 100,000 Pontic Greeks were exiled to Central Asia in two waves, the first in the late 1930s and the second in the late 1940s. Even after Stalin’s death, Greeks in the Soviet Union faced discrimination. According to one source, “Under both the Khrushchev and Brezhnev regimes, Greeks (with few exceptions) continued to occupy a disadvantaged position in Soviet society and were unable to obtain high positions in political, military, scientific, and academic hierarchies.” Ronald Suny, however, notes that Greek interests were accommodated in Georgia under the government of Eduard Shevardnadze in the 1970s and early 1980s (see The Making of the Georgia Nation, p. 313).

One of the main centers of Greek culture in the early Soviet Union was the city of Sukhumi in Abkhazia, formerly part of the Georgian Soviet Republic and now a self-declared independent state aligned with Russia. Before World War II, Sukhumi’s Hellenic community of some 65,000 supported Greek schools, theaters, newspapers, and libraries. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Sukhumi still had some 17,000 Pontic Greeks. As Georgians, Abkhazians, and Russians began to struggle over the fate of Abkhazia in 1991, the local Greeks began to flee, even though “[they] were encouraged by both sides to remain in the area throughout the conflict, and were even offered high ministerial and administrative positions.” In 1993, the Athens government carried out “Operation Golden Fleece” to evacuate most of the remaining population from the conflict zone. By 2003, only around 2,000 Greeks still lived in Abkhazia.

Although the Greek communities of the coastal zone are of long standing, those of interior Georgia date back only to the late eighteenth century. In 1763, Heraclius II, one of the last independent Georgian monarchs, enticed a sizable contingent of Pontic Greeks to settle in the area that now straddles the border of Georgia and Armenia, where he was developing silver and lead mines as part of an aborted modernization program. A second group fled the Ottoman Empire for Russian-ruled Georgia in 1829-1830, after the Greek War of Independence triggered the harassment of Anatolian Greeks. These refugees settled mostly in the Trialeti Plateau region of south-central Georgia, with the multi-lingual and now majority Armenian city of Tsalka forming their hub. Although these so-called Tsalka Urums were almost entirely Turkic-speaking—as the label “Urum” indicates—late Soviet ethnographic studies found that “36% of them considered Greek their mother tongue despite their lack of knowledge of that language, [and that] 96% expressed their desire to learn Greek.”

With the downfall of the Soviet Union and the independence of Georgia, the Tsalka Urums began to forsake Georgia for Greece. According some reports, the Greek community of south-central Georgia declined from 35,000 in 1989 to 3,000 in 2002, although the 2002 Georgian census still listed 7,415 “Greeks” in the Kvemo-Kartli administrative unit. The reasons for this precipitous decline are debatable. Some Greek sources claim that the Tsalka Urums were basically driven out by other ethnic groups. According to an April 2005 report in the Hellenic Resources Network, “Greek families have been massacred and others have been forced out of their villages, according to local ethnic Greek organizations.” Another report on the same site claims that internal migration within Georgia added to the community’s woes: “The remote Tsalka … became attractive for the Svanja, the domestic immigrants from western Georgia, and the Adjarians. … The squatters committed acts of violence … to force the ethnic Greeks to abandon their homeland.” The same sources, however, also mention an economic rationale for the migration, noting that retirees in the area receive pensions equivalent to twelve Euros a month, far less that what they are able to collect in Greece.

Several lessons can be drawn from the story of the Pontic Greeks of Georgia. The first is that ethnic mapping often fails to keep pace with events on the ground. Older maps depicted a substantial Greek population in south-central Georgia, as was indeed appropriate. More recent maps tend to copy from these sources, failing to capture such recent changes as the near disappearance of this Greek community. Recent maps also generally fail to note the disappearance of the southernmost area of Ossetian inhabitation in Georgia. I have accordingly changed one of the most widely used ethno-linguistic maps of the Caucasus, erasing the “Greek” and “Ossetian” areas from Georgia proper. I have also deleted the “Georgian” area from South Ossetia, as a significant degree of ethnic cleansing has occurred here as well.

A second lesson concerns the complex relationship between ethnic identity and language. One might assume that an area labeled “Greek” on an “ethno-linguistic map” would be Greek-speaking, but that is not the case in regard to Tsalka. Strictly speaking, such a designation is incorrect, as Urums are Greek only in the ethnic sense. Yet polling data from the late Soviet period indicated that many people here proclaimed a Greek linguistic identity even though they did not actually speak Greek, but merely hoped to learn it. Also important was their use of the Greek script to signal group membership.

Finally, the plight of the Georgian Greeks also speaks to the broader reduction of the Greek community abroad. The Greeks, like the Jews, the Armenians, and the Lebanese, are one of the great diasporic peoples of western Eurasia, their communities historically scattered over a vast territorial expanse. But ethnic persecution and economic hardship abroad, coupled with enticements from the national homeland, have reduced the extent of the Greek diaspora. In the process, the modern ethnic map of the Caucasus has become less intricate than that of the recent past.

In a similar process, many members of the Armenian community living in other parts of the Caucasus have relocated to Armenia (and Nagorno-Karabakh), a movement that has been going on for some time. Yet Armenia is now to sending many more migrants abroad than it takes in, thus perpetuating the Armenian diaspora in a different manner, as we shall see in a subsequent GeoCurrents post.

* The 2001 Ukrainian census lists 91,000 “Greeks” for the country as a whole, whereas the 1989 census counted 98,500 Ukrainian Greeks, only 14,286 named Greek as their native language. Whether the others are Turkic or Russian speakers was not mentioned.

* Some sources claim a few thousand Rumca speakers, many of them elderly, still live in northeastern Turkey, although the comprehensive Ethnologue has no information on the group.

While it is indisputable that Ossetians speak an Iranian language, it is not immediately apparent whether they descend from an Iranian group such as the Alans, or alternatively if they are descendants of one of the autochthonous groups from the Caucasus, which adopted an Iranian language in the early Middle Ages or possibly even earlier; according to this second theory, prior to the adoption of an Iranian language, the Ossetians spoke some Caucasian language (more on which one below). Recent genetic studies seem to confirm both of these hypotheses because different research teams come up with dissimilar and often contradictory results, though the newer research points in the second direction. In this post, we will try to unravel some of these complex data and conclusions.

An earlier study on Ossetian DNA was conducted by Ivan Nasidze and his colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, the Center of Integrative Genomics at the University of Lausanne and the Vavilov Institute of General Genetics in Moscow, and its results published in a 2004 article in Annals of Human Genetics. This team concluded that a common origin of Ossetians is from an Iranian group, followed by subsequent influx of mostly males from the neighboring Caucasian tribes. According to their findings, mitochondrial DNA data, which traces maternal descent, suggests a common origin for North and South Ossetians, as well as their close affinity with other Iranian groups. In contrast, the Y‑DNA data, which traces paternal descent, indicates that North Ossetians are more similar to other North Caucasian groups, and South Ossetians are more similar to other South Caucasian groups, than to each other. In human terms, these findings translate into the following picture: Iranian-speaking Alan women marrying local Caucasian men.

However, while it makes sense that the Ossetians would intermarry with other groups on their respective slopes of the Caucasus mountains, the conclusion that Iranian-speaking women intermarried with Caucasian men challenges everything we know about the interactions of nomadic pastoralists (in this case, Iranian-speaking Alans) with more sedentary groups (in this case, the indigenous Caucasian groups).

The theory of Alan women marrying indigenous men of the Caucasus also contradicts the overall picture that emerges from other instances of gender-specific migration and language shift: according to a recent study, conducted by Peter Forster and Colin Renfrew of the University of Cambridge, “language change among our prehistoric ancestors came about via the arrival of immigrant men — rather than women — into new settlements”. In other words, more often than not it is women who adopt their husbands’ tongue, rather than the other way around. If present-day Ossetians descended from (mostly) Iranian mothers and Caucasian fathers, we’d expect them to speak a Caucasian rather than an Iranian language, contrary to the fact.

There are also some methodological problems with Nasidze et al.’s work. Generally speaking, they took a very zoomed-out view of the Ossetians’ DNA: for instance, they examined only a small portion of the mitochondrial DNA (HVR1 region of about 400 base pairs out of 16,569 base pairs); and as far as Y-DNA is concerned, they did not look further downstream than the mutation that defines Haplogroup F, thus potentially missing some connections between North and South Ossetian men.

More recent work, such as the study from a team of geneticists, anthropologists and linguists, published in Molecular Biology and Evolution (see Balanovsky 2011), also challenged Nasidze et al.’s conclusions. Balanovsky et al.’s study focused on the Y-DNA from several ethno-linguistic groups in the North Caucasus; as far as the Ossetians are concerned, only the Y-DNA of North Ossetians was examined, but this study used a larger number of individual samples (357 samples from Ossetians alone). Rather than finding much Y-DNA in common with other Caucasian groups, Balanovsky’s team claims that most Ossetian men carry a certain genetic signature that is common to them alone. Specifically, they found that at least 56% of Ossetian men (and up to 73% among the Iron) share haplogroup G2a1a-P18 (which is a subgroup of G2a1-P16 shown in blue in pie charts in the map below; from Balanovsky et al. 2011).* This haplogroup is found on average in only 3% of males in other Caucasian groups (the two other group that has a relatively high frequency of this haplogroup are the Abkhazians and the Circassians, with 12% and 9% respectively).

The Ossetians’ neighbors to the west, speakers of Northwest Caucasian languages – the Shapsugs, the Circassians, and the Abkhasians – belong predominantly to haplogroup G2a3b1-P303 (shown in yellow in pie charts in the map above). The frequency of this haplogroup among speakers of Northwest Caucasian languages ranges from 21% among the Abkhaz to 86% among the Shapsugs, while it is found only in 3% of the Ossetians. To the east of the Ossetians we find speakers of Nakh languages (Chechen and Ingush), who belong predominantly to haplogroup J2a4b-M67(xM92), shown in red in pie charts in the map above; and of Dagestanian languages (among them Dargin, Avar, Kaitag, Kubachi, and Lezgi were tested), who belong predominantly to haplogroup J1-M267(xP58), shown in green in pie charts in the map above. The frequency of these two haplogroups among the Ossetians is 8.4% and 2.6% respectively. In other words, the Ossetians do not share much Y-DNA with their neighbors in the North Caucasus, according to this more recent study by Balanovsky et al.

Another piece is added to the puzzle if we consider more closely what sorts of mutations the Ossetian men share. Their most common genetic signature – G2a1a – is characterized by the presence of single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) known as P18. However, Ossetians also share another genetic signature: 10 short tandem repeats (STRs) at position DYS392. Unlike SNPs, whose rate of mutation is measured in thousands of years, the rate of STR mutations is much more rapid (this is why STRs are an important tool both for tracing genealogical ancestry and for determining genetic profiles in forensic cases). Having such a high concentration of Ossetian men with the same STR count means that the group built up rather rapidly over the last 1,500 years or less. This is compatible with the hypothesis that the Ossetians are descendants of a small number of (possibly related) male invaders, contra Nasidze et al. (2004). Alternatively, if a later date is assumed, Ossetian men may be hypothesized to be descendants of a small group who survived the genetic bottleneck associated with the destruction of Alania by Tamerlane in the late 1300s.

Balanovsky et al.’s study also allows us to hazard a guess as to what kind of language the ancestors of present-day Ossetians spoke before being acculturated by the Iranian-speaking Alans. Balanovsky et al.’s study confirms that common language serves as a bridge for gene flow between populations; for example,

“Circassians, who are geographically situated between Adyghes and Ossets, might receive more gene flow from Adyghes, who speak a similar language, than from Ossets who differ in their language and culture.” (pp. 2915-2916)

Since the Ossetians are separated from their eastern neighbors by a more significant genetic boundary (line A on the map above) than from their western neighbors (line C on the map above), it stands to reason that the maternal ancestors of the Ossetians spoke a Northwest Caucasian language, likely a closer relative of Kabardian or Circassian.

But the plot thickens if we consider the question of where these haplogroup G2a1a Ossetian males might have come from. If we believe that this genetic signature among the Ossetian males comes from the Alans, it is expected that the Alans (or their predessors the Scythians/Sarmatians) must also have been high in haplogroup G2a1a, or its ancestral clade G (see map on the left). Moreover, certain areas of Europe to which large numbers of Alans and other Sarmatians migrated also feature a higher frequency of haplogroup G. However, the subtype of haplogroup G found in these European areas is not the expected Ossetian G2a1a, nor the G2a3b1, common among the Kabardinians of the northwestern Caucasus adjacent to the Ossetians.

Furthermore, examination of ancient DNA from what is thought to be Scythian skeletons from the south Siberian steppes to the northeast of the Caucasus has found only haplogroup R1a1-M17, common in Eastern Europe, parts of Central and Northern Asia (see map). According to Keyser et al. (2009), this haplogroup is the “mark [of] the eastward migration of the early Indo-Europeans”. But if the Scythians/Sarmatians were high in haplogrop R1a1 (and not G), why aren’t more Ossetians in haplogroup R1a1 (which is practically not found in the Ossetian population at all)? Is it the case that (the majority of) Ossetian male ancestors came from an indigenous Caucasian group after all?

And so the mystery of the Ossetians’ past remains…

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*Subgroups are numbered by adding alternative numbers and letters: for example, haplogroup G2a1a is a subgroup of G2a1, which is in turn a subgroup of G2a, which is a subgroup of G2, itself a subgroup of G. The large haplogroups numbered by one letter are not necessarily independent either: for example, haplogroup G is a subgroup of F (see chart below). The letters and numbers after a hyphen refer to the defining mutation. For example, haplogroup G is defined by mutation M201, whereas haplogroup G2a1a is defined by mutation P18.

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Balanovsky, Oleg; Khadizhat Dibirova; Anna Dybo; Oleg Mudrak; Svetlana Frolova; Elvira Pocheshkhova; Marc Haber; Daniel Platt; Theodore Schurr; Wolfgang Haak; Marina Kuznetsova; Magomed Radzhabov; Olga Balaganskaya; Alexey Romanov; Tatiana Zakharova; David F. Soria Hernanz; Pierre Zalloua; Sergey Koshel; Merritt Ruhlen; Colin Renfrew; R. Spencer Wells; Chris Tyler-Smith; Elena Balanovska; and The Genographic Consortium (2011) Parallel Evolution of Genes and Languages in the Caucasus Region. Molecular Biology and Evolution 28(10): 2905–2920.

Keyser C., Bouakaze C., Crubézy E., Nikolaev V.G., Montagnon D., Reis T., Ludes B. (2009) Ancient DNA provides new insights into the history of south Siberian Kurgan people. Human Genetics 126(3): 395-410. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19449030

Nasidze, Ivane S.; Dominique Quinque, Isabelle Dupanloup, Sergey Rychkov, Oksana Naumova, Olga Zhukova and Mark Stoneking (2004) Genetic Evidence Concerning the Origins of South and North Ossetians. Annals of Human Genetics 68: 588-599.

The genetic classification of the Ossetian language places it in the Northeastern branch (see the bottom right branch in the tree on the left) of the Iranian language family. (As is often the case in linguistic classification, the Iranian language family is itself a branch of an even bigger family, in this instance, of the Indo-European stock.) The closest relatives of Ossetian include Avestan and Sogdian; both are by now extinct. Its closest living relative is the language called Yagnobi, spoken by some 2,000 speaker in a high mountain valley of the Yagnob River in western Tajikistan (see the map below). The better-known “cousins” of the Ossetian language in other branches of the Iranian family include Farsi, Kurdish, Balochi, Hazaragi and Pashto, and are spoken in Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The only other Iranian languages found in the Caucasus region — Tat and Talysh, both spoken in Azerbaijan — belong to a different branch of the Iranian family.

The classification of Ossetian as an Iranian language is based primarily on the abundance of words of Iranian, or more generally Indo-European, origin among its basic vocabulary. For example, the Ossetian word for ‘new’ is næwæg is a cognate of the Pashto nəvay, the Persian now (pronounced like the English no, not like now), and more distantly, the Sanskrit nava, the Russian novyj and even the English new. Similarly, the Ossetian word for ‘mother’ — mad — is cognate with the Pashto mōr, the Persian mādar, the Russian mat’ and the English mother itself (compare it also to the Old English word modor ‘mother’). Other cognates highlight the classification of the Ossetian language as a member of the Iranian family, though no obvious correspondences exist with the western Indo-European languages, like English or Russian. For instance, compare the Ossetian shyrx ‘red’ with its Indo-Aryan cognates: the Pashto sur and the Persian sorx.

Bt the affinity of Ossetian with other Iranian languages can be found not only in the basic vocabulary but also in the deep grammatical patterns of the language. For example, Ossetian is like other Iranian languages in featuring the Subject-Object-Verb order, which is quite unlike the order in most other Indo-European languages, including English, which have the Subject-Verb-Object order. For instance, the sentence ‘The elders gave a name to the boy’ in Ossetian is Xishtærtæ læppujyl nom shæværdtoj, literally, ‘the elders on the boy the name put’. In line with the cross-linguistic typological tendencies, being a Subject-Object-Verb language, Ossetian also has postpositions rather than prepositions, so that words like ‘in’ or ‘to’ appear after rather than before the noun. So, ‘near the house’ in Ossetian is literally ‘house near’ and ‘behind the house’ is ‘house behind’.

Another grammatical pattern that places Ossetian among Iranian languages and distinguishes is quite clearly from languages indigenous to the Caucasus is the way its case system works. To illustrate this, let’s consider the English pronouns first (as English nouns have lost their case marking in the wake of the Norman conquest). In English, a pronoun used as a subject appears in the same form (called “nominative case”) regardless of whether an object is also present or not: thus, He kissed Mary and He left. However, if a pronoun is used as an object, it appears in a different form (called “accusative case”): for example, Mary kissed him (not *Mary kissed he). The same applies to other Indo-European languages, such as Latin, German, Romanian and Russian. In contrast, indigenous Caucasian languages, such as Chechen or Georgian, exhibit a different pattern, called “ergative-absolutive”: unlike in English, the subjects of ‘He kissed him’ and ‘He left’ are not in the same form. Instead, the subject of an object-less (in linguistic lingo, “intransitive”) sentence like ‘He left’ appears in the same form as the object (it is called “absolutive case”), so you can think of these sentences as being literally ‘He kissed him’ and ‘Him left’. The subject that co-occurs with an object is in the so-called “ergative case”, hence the term “ergativity”. Crucially for our discussion, Ossetian patterns with other Indo-European languages and not with Chechen and Georgian in this respect.

However, even thought the Ossetian’s “relationship with the Iranian family, despite considerable individual traits, does not arouse any doubt” (in the words of an Ossetian linguist Vaso Abaev), its two-thousand year sojourn in the Caucasus left an indelible mark on various aspects of the language, including its vocabulary, its sound system, and even its grammar.

As one would expect, Ossetian borrowed numerous words from languages that are indigenous to the region. For example, its southern neighbors the Georgians contributed zwar ‘cross, sanctuary’ (note that both Iron Ossetians and Georgians are Christians), and its western neighbors the Kabardians supplied žatʃ’e ‘beard’. The latter word also features a kind of sound that is commonly found in languages indigenous to the Caucasus, but which is otherwise exotic and not found in other Indo-European languages (except some dialects of Armenian, which must have borrowed it from its Caucasian neighbors too). This sound is the ejective /tʃ’/. It sounds like the first and the last sounds in church but with a certain “spat out” quality to it, achieved by closing the space between the vocal cords (called “glottis”), which greatly raises air pressure in the mouth, creating a dramatic burst of air (don’t try this at home!). In addition to /tʃ’/, Ossetian has four other ejective sounds: /p’/, /t’/, /k’/, and /ts’/, as in p’a ‘kiss’, t’æpp ‘blow’, k’uʃ ‘bowl’, and ts’iu ‘little bird’, all four “spat out” variants of /p/, /t/, /k/, and /ts/ respectively. (You can hear snippets of Ossetian radio shows here.)

As mentioned above, such ejective sounds are relatively rare cross-linguistically: they are found in about 15% of the world’s languages and not in any familiar ones: Athabaskan, Siouan and Salishan languages in North America; Quechua and Aymara (spoken in Bolivia); Amharic (spoken in Ethiopia); Hadza and Sandawe (spoken in Tanzania); Khoisan languages of southern Africa; and Itelmen (spoken in Kamchatka). These language families are unrelated among themselves, which means that ejective sounds arose in multiple places independently. Moreover, if you’ve seen the movie Avatar, you’ve heard some ejective sounds in the made-up language Na’vi.

The similarities between Ossetian and other languages of the Caucasus do not end with just a few borrowed words or sounds, and can be found in some deep grammatical patterns as well. As mentioned above, Ossetian has the kind of case system common among Indo-European languages, where the subject appears in the nominative case regardless of whether an object is also present. However, unlike a typical Indo-European language which makes do with an average of four cases, Ossetian has nine cases: nominative, genitive, dative, allative, ablative, inessive, adessive, equative and comitative. This relatively rich system of cases – including several locative cases such as allative (‘to’), ablative (‘from’), inessive (‘in’), adessive (‘at, on’) – may well be a borrowed Caucasian trait. The Ossetians’ neighbors to the east, especially in Dagestan, are well-known for their very rich systems of cases to mark location and direction: for example, Lezgin (a Lezgic language with some 784,000 speakers mostly in Dagestan) has 14 cases to mark different types of location and direction; Avar (an Avar-Andic language with 788,000 native speaker and also used as a lingua franca of Dagestan) has 20 locative cases; Dido (also known as Tsez, another Avar-Andic language with some 7,000 speakers in southern Dagestan) has 28 locative cases (and 56 cases if the distal/non-distal distinction is taken into account); Tabasaran (a Lezgic language with some 129,000 speakers in southern Dagestan) is said to top the charts with perhaps as many as 53 locative cases, depending on the dialect and analysis. Here’s a couple of examples of what this plethora of locative cases may be used for, both from Dido. Where English marks the ‘in’ relation with the same preposition regardless of whether something is ‘in’ a substance or ‘in’ an empty container, Dido uses two distinct case markers in its translations of ‘There’s a fly in my soup’ and ‘There’s a fly in my bowl’. Similarly, where English uses the same preposition for ‘on’ regardless of whether a horizontal or a vertical surface is involved, as in The picture is on the table and The picture is on the wall, Dido once again marks this distinction via different locative cases. Ossetian, as mentioned above, have some of these locative cases, though not as many as the Dagestanian languages.

The presence of such Caucasian influences on deep grammatical patterns of an otherwise typical Iranian/Indo-European language suggests a certain degree of intermarriage between Iranian-speaking ancestors of the Ossetians – the Alans – and their Caucasian neighbors. When people (usually, women) marry into another linguistic group, they typically pick up the language of their new community, but speak it with the “home accent”, introducing sounds and structures of their native tongue into their adoptive one. Children who grow up in such bilingual families and communities are not able to distinguish the “accented” structures from the native ones and thus mix them even more freely. A few generations down the line such originally “foreign” structures become fully incorporated into the language of the wider community. If so, we should look for both Iranian and Caucasian “genes” among the Ossetians, and indeed we find both (more on this in the next Geocurrents post).

The Sarmatians were probably not a single ethnic group, let alone a unified nation, but rather a collection of related tribes that spoke closely related Iranian languages and followed similar pastoral ways of life. Discussed at length by ancient Greek and Roman geographers, the Sarmatians were depicted as a proud and warlike people, noted by some for sending young women into battle. (Recent archeological investigations seem to bear this out, as many Sarmatian graves contain skeletons of women dressed for war.)

Long after they seemingly disappeared from history, the Sarmatians retained significance in the European imagination. In the seventeenth century, most members of the Polish nobility convinced themselves that they had descended not from the Slavic tribes that had given rise to their nation’s peasantry, but rather from the Sarmatians; as a result, they widely adopted modes of dress and manners that they associated with this ancient group. The resulting style, called “Sarmatism,” remained influential until the 1800s and has not completely disappeared. In its modern guise, however, the movement has been widened, with various central and eastern European nationalists claiming Sarmatian ancestry for their entire societies. Neo-Nazis also look back to the group; a “Sarmatians” image-search on the internet yields numerous links to the infamous Stormfront website.

The Sarmatian hold on their grassland home was apparently lost to others in the fourth century. It was around this time that certain Sarmatian groups became known to history as the Alans. From the west, the Germanic Ostrogoths moved into the steppes and took up a largely equestrian way of life, while the Huns invaded from the east, threatening Sarmatians and Ostrogoths alike. Pastoral polities of the time, however, were often quite fluid, allowing peoples of different language groups to join together, whether in semi-institutionalized confederacies or mere armed aggregations of coercion or convenience. A few Alan groups evidently joined the Huns, but most fled west into Europe to avoid domination. They moved not as a single people, however, but in numerous contingents, many of which attached themselves to the Germanic tribes that were also fleeing the Huns into the dying Western Roman Empire. Some Alans allied with the (Germanic) Burgundians to establish a strong presence in Gaul. Others moved into the Iberian Peninsula, ruling over a short-lived Alanic kingdom in the early 400s. Many more joined forces with the Vandals, accompanying them in their invasion of Roman North Africa in 429 CE.

  The various Alan groups that moved into the Roman world in the late 300s and early 400s did not maintain their language or identity for long. In most cases, they merged with the more tightly unified Germanic peoples and were eventually subsumed into the general populations of the areas in which they settled. They did leave marks, however, as suggested by numerous place names along the lines of “Alainville.” They also seem to have figured prominently in the development of the medieval ideals of chivalry.

If C. Scott Littleton and Linda Malcor are to be believed, the cultural legacy of the Alans in Europe was profound. In a fascinating and controversial book entitled From Scythia to Camelot: A Radical Reassessment of the Legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the Holy Grail, Littleton and Malcor argue that most of the Arthurian corpus derives from the stories and myths of the Alans. Although criticized for downplaying the Celtic aspects of the legends, Littleton and Malcor present abundant evidence leading back to the Alans. Guinevere, they allow, was a Celtic figure, but Lancelot and many others seem to have a Sarmatian origin. As they show, the north Caucasus’s own epic writings, the Nart Sagas, bear a curious resemblance to the Arthurian stories, abounding in magical swords and supernatural chalices.

Although most of the Alans swept into Western Europe and North Africa in late antiquity, others evidently sought refuge in the deep valleys of the Greater Caucasus range, where they intermarried with the indigenous peoples of the region. In time their descendants were able to establish a state of their own. By the 700s, the Kingdom of Alania linked the central Caucasus Mountains with a broad swath of the steppe zone of the north. Alania was soon embroiled in a complex geopolitical contest for the larger region, involving the Arab Caliphate, the Byzantine Empire, and the Khazar Khanate (an empire based in the northern Caspian Sea region whose ruling elite adopted Judaism). Alliance with the Khazars evidently resulted in numerous conversions to Judaism among the Alans, but Christianity triumphed in the higher circles of Alania, based on strong connections with both the Greeks and the Georgians, although pre-Christian beliefs and practices did not vanish entirely. Medieval Alania was already well integrated into the diplomatic circles of the Orthodox Christian realm. Several Alan princesses married into royal houses in Russia, Georgia, and the Byzantine Empire.

Alania was devastated by the Mongol invasions of the early 1200s and essentially destroyed by the incursions of Tamerlane in the late 1300s. As had happened in the fourth century, some Alans fled the invading armies; others sought refuge in the remote Caucasian valleys; still others became incorporated into the conquering society. Joining forces with the Mongols, more than a few ended up in China, where “30,000 Alans formed the royal guard (Asud) of the Yuan court in Dadu (Beijing).” Another sizable group received refuge in Hungary; their descendants, the Jassic people or Jász, are still viewed as a distinct ethnic group, numbering some 85,000.

The Alans who retreated into the Caucasus after the Mongol assaults were unable to reconstitute their kingdom. Instead they split into petty polities and came under the partial domination of their Kabardian neighbors. They eventually divided into two distinct ethnic groups, the Iron and the Digor, marked by differences in dialect and territory. Ossetian religion came to be marked by a strongly syncretic bent, with the names of Christian saints commonly identified with pre-Christian gods. After the Russian conquest in the late 1700s, Orthodox Christianity experienced a revival, especially among the Iron. Islam also spread into Ossetia, passing from the Kabardians to the Digor especially. Syncretic beliefs and practices, however, persist among both groups, alongside mainstream Islam and Christianity. Such syncretism has historically been common through much of the North Caucasus, although more orthodox forms of faith have been spreading rapidly over the past few decades.

In the late Soviet period, Ossetian intellectuals began to reclaim their Alanian heritage, and in 1994 North Ossetia was officially renamed “North Ossetia-Alania.” This move may have been meant to help fuse the Digor and Iron into a single nationality, as the two groups remain divided by dialect and to a certain extent by religion as well. Loyalty to the Iron people rather than to the Ossetians as a whole is evident in a disarming hip-hop video found here. Although labeled “Ossetian Rap” in the English-language YouTube service, its actual title, in Cyrillic script, is “Iron Rap” (ИРОН РЭП).

The next two GeoCurrents posts, by Asya Pereltsvaig, will further explore the Ossetian people. The first will look at the Ossetian language and its place in the Indo-European family; the second will examine the genetic make-up of the group. As is often the case, linguistic and genetic evidence indicate that the historical background of the Ossetians is more complicated than it might seem.

(Many thanks to David Erschler for his corrections to the original post.)