CHAPTER 10

A WORLD APART: THE COLCHIAN CULTURE

The western Caucasus has for a long time been a place apart.This remote parcel of land tucked at the eastern end of the Black Sea has stirred the imagination of Europeans over the centuries. It is where myth and reality seem to blur – an enchanted place that evokes a sense of the exotic.It is where,too,the concept of a borderland is perhaps at its most acute. Of its two physical attributes – humid lowlands and lofty mountains – it is the former, in Colchis, the land of the fabled Golden Fleece, that most captured the minds of the ancient Greeks.1 Indeed, the tale of the Argonauts’ quest, preserved in its fullest account in The Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, continues to fascinate. ‘The great fame this country had in early times’, wrote Strabo in the first century,‘is disclosed by the myths, which refer in an obscure way to the expedition of Jason’ (Strab. 11.2.18).

And in Charles Kingsley’s The Heroes, a nineteenth-century children’s tale of the Argonauts’ quest, we read:

And at day dawn they looked eastward, and midway between the sea and the sky they saw white snow peaks hanging, glittering sharp and bright above the clouds.And they knew they were come to Caucasus, at the end of all the earth:

Caucasus the highest of all mountains, the father of the rivers of the East. On his peak lies chained the Titan, while a vulture tears out his heart; and at his feet are piled dark forests round the magic Colchian land. (Kingsley 1980 [1856]: 106–107)

The arrival of the Greeks in Colchis and the complex topic of Greek colonisation of the region are beyond the scope of this book, though we should

1 Braund 1994; Lordkipanidze 2001a.

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note the scarcity of written sources for the region in general.2 We have brief references in the poetry of Hesiod and Eumelos, both of whom had a rough grasp of Colchian geography and the main mythical characters, like Aeetes and Medea, but on the whole our evidence is slim.3 Before the Greeks, the kings of Urartu, the Iron Age Kingdom centred on Lake Van, made fleeting references to the far away land of Qulha (or Kolkha), which is generally accepted to be Colchis.4

But the discreteness of the western Caucasus was recognised early on – a distinctiveness that extends back well before the arrival of the Greeks, to the last few centuries of the fourth millennium BC.5 Indeed, the inferences drawn from a range of excavations suggest that this territory spawned a number of related cultures, one evolving into the next, which collectively formed a cohesive geographical and social zone termed Proto-Colchian (ca. 2700–1600 BC) and Ancient (or Early) Colchian (ca. 1600–700 BC).Various studies subdivide these two periods further on the basis of chronometric dates and ceramic typology.6 They are to be distinguished from the final Colchian period, during which Greek colonies were established in western Georgia in the sixth century BC.The Proto-Colchian culture corresponds to the Early and Middle Bronze Ages of the Black Sea region and part of the hinterland of Colchis. Its main characteristics are mound and hilltop settlements with wattle-and-daub buildings, black polished and coarse pottery, and evidence of a strong metallurgical tradition.These features continue to a certain extent into the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages, or the Ancient Colchian period.

At its peak, in the early Iron Age, products of this culture can be found beyond Colchis. As we have seen, the northern Caucasus (the central and western regions of Koban culture) and western Georgia shared many items of metalwork, attesting to an intensive system of contact. Colchian communities also had dealings with the regions of Shida Kartli and Meskheti, though on a less intensive level. Colchian influence appears also to have spread southward along the coastal plain as far as Ordu, where a hoard of typical Colchian metalwork was discovered.7 Judging by the number of Colchian-Koban-type axes held in museums in north-eastern Anatolia, mostly without provenance, the

2On cultural interplay between the Greeks and the Colchians, see Lordkipanidze 1991: 125–32; 2001a. For a counter view, see Tsetskhladze 2010/2011 and references therein.

On early contacts with the Aegean, see Abramishvili 2001, 2010.

3 Braund 1994: 8–39; 73–118. On the myth of the Golden Fleece, see Mackie 2001.

4See, for example, Diakonoff and Kashkai 1981: 68–9. Köroğlu (2001) thinks differently and equates Qulha with Göle in the Kars region. I would like to thank Atilla Batmaz for

these references.

5 Przeworski 1935: 390–414, figs 46–7; Koridze 1965: 19, fig. 10.

6Kuftin (1950: 138–9) and Gogadze (1982, 1984) proposed early definitions of the terms Proto-Colchian and Ancient Colchian. See also Baramidze 1999. For a review of chron-

ological schemes, see Apakidze 2009.

7 Koridze 1965: 19–21, no. 23, fig. 10 (Ordu), 20 no. 27; 24 fig. 13 (Artvin).