Northwest Caucasian People

Northwest Caucasian languages

Flag of Adygea

Kabardino-Balkaria

Flag of Karachay-Cherkessia

Flag of Abkhazia

Northwest Caucasian languages:

The Northwest Caucasian languages, also called Abkhazo-Adyghean, or sometimes Pontic as opposed to Caspian for the Northeast Caucasian languages, are a group of languages spoken in the Caucasus region, chiefly in Russia (Adygea, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachay–Cherkessia), the disputed territory of Abkhazia, and Turkey, with smaller communities scattered throughout the Middle East.

Circassian (or Cherkess) is a cover term for the series of dialects that include the literary languages of Adyghe and Kabardian. The Adyghe (Adyge, Adyg) language is one of the more widely spoken Northwest Caucasian languages. Adyghe has three phonemic vowels, and its consonants and consonant clusters are less complex than the Abkhaz–Abaza dialects.

The Ubykh language forms a third branch, despite its parallels with Adyghe and Abkhaz. The population switched to speaking Adyghe, and Ubykh became extinct on October 7, 1992, with the death of Tevfik Esenç. A dialectal division within Ubykh was suspected by Georges Dumézil, but the divergent form he described in 1965 was never investigated further. With eighty-one consonants, Ubykh has one of the largest inventories in the world, and probably the largest outside the Khoisan languages. There are pharyngealised consonants and a four-way place contrast among sibilants. It was the only Northwest Caucasian language never to have a literary form.

A number of factors make the reconstruction of the Northwest Caucasian proto-language problematic:

• most roots in Northwest Caucasian languages are monosyllabic, and many are single consonants;

• the sound changes are often intricate, and a large number of consonants and sibilant contrasts provides further complexity;

• ablaut was extensive and still plays some part in the modern languages;

• borrowings between languages of the family were frequent;

• extensive homophony occurs in the modern languages.

For these reasons, Proto–Northwest Caucasian is widely accepted as being one of the most difficult proto-languages to deal with, and it is therefore more difficult than most to relate to other families.

Relations:

Some scholars have seen affinities between the Northwest Caucasian (Circassian) family and the extinct Hattic language. Hattic was spoken in Anatolia (Turkey), in the area around ancient Hattusa (modern Boğazköy), until about 1800 BC, when it was replaced by the Indo-European Hittite language.

Many Northwest Caucasian (Adygean) family names have prefixes like “Hath” or “Hatti”, and one of the well known Adyghe tribes has the name “Hattiqwai” (From “Hatti” + “male or son”; meaning “HattiSon”).

It has been conjectured that the North-West Caucasian languages may be genetically related to the Indo-European family, at a time depth of perhaps 12,000 years before the present. This hypothesised proto-language is called Proto-Pontic, but is not widely accepted.

There does at least appear to have been extensive contact between the two proto-languages, and the resemblances may be due to this influence.

Many linguists join the Northwest and Northeast Caucasian languages into a North Caucasian family, sometimes simply called Kavkazian (in opposition to Kartvelian (South Caucasian), which is thought to be unrelated, albeit heavily influenced by their northern neighbours).

This hypothesis has perhaps been best illustrated by Sergei A. Starostin and Sergei Nikolayev, who present a set of phonological correspondences and shared morphological structure. However, there is no consensus that the relationship has been demonstrated, and many consider the correspondences to be spurious.

Northwest Caucasian People:

The Adyghe – Circassians:

The Adyghe or Adygs (Adyghe: Adǝgă, Arabic: Jarkas/Sharkas, Turkish: çerkez, Persian: Charkas), also often known as Circassians or Cherkess, are a North Caucasian ethnic group who were displaced in the course of the Russian conquest of the Caucasus in the 19th century, especially after the Russian–Circassian War of 1862.

Adyghe people mainly speak Circassian (called Adyghe) and it has 12 dialects out of which 4 are mostly used. The Abzakh & Shapsogh dialects in the west, the Bjadogh in the South west (the Black Sea shore), and the Kabardin (Kabartai) in the Center.

Predominant religions include Sunni Islam and Russian Orthodox Christianity. There remain about 700,000 speakers of Circassian in Adygea (Adygeans), Karachay–Cherkessia (just Circassians) and Kabardino-Balkaria (Kabards), as well as a number in the Russian Federation outside these republics.

The Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization estimates that there are as many as 3.7 million “ethnic Circassians” in the diaspora outside the Circassian republics (meaning that only one in seven “ethnic Circassians” is a speaker of the Circassian language), of whom about 2 million live in the Republic of Turkey, 700,000 in the Russian Federation, about 150,000 in the Middle East, and about 50,000 in western countries (Europe and USA).

The Adyghe people originate in the North Caucasus region, an area they are believed to have occupied as early as the Stone Age period, with traces of them dating back as far as 8000 BC.

An agricultural and cattle-breeding culture arose in the Northwest Caucasus in the early Bronze age. By 3000 B.C., the Dolmen culture, whose name comes from the distinctive megaliths used as grave markers, had arisen here and reached its peak; it lasted until the last quarter of the second millennium B.C. The area where the Caucasian dolmens are found is the ancestral home of the Adyghe-Abkhaz tribes. Today, there are five dolmen fields in the republic with about 200 whole and partly ruined dolmens.

In about 4000 BC the Maykop culture existed in the North Caucasus region, which influenced all subsequent cultures in the North Caucasus region as well as other parts of the region which is now southern Russia. Archaeological findings, mainly of dolmens in North-West Caucasus region, indicate the existence of a megalithic culture in the region.

The Maykop culture of the Kuban valley coexisted with the Dolmen culture. The first classical monuments of the Maykop culture in the form of large burial mounds (kurgans) containing splendid articles made of precious metals were discovered in the Kuban before the Revolution. They include the well-known kurgan excavated in Maykop in 1897 by Professor N.I. Veselovsky, which gave its name to the culture as whole. The settlements of Meshoko, Skala, Khadzhokh, and Yasenovaya Polyana are other well-known monuments of this period.

The names of North Caucasian tribes, such as the Meots, Sinds, Akhei, Zikhs, and others that played a major role in the ethnogenesis of the Adyghe, first became known in about 1000 BC. In Greek and Roman sources, they are referred to collectively as Meots, and in 1000 B.C., they occupied the eastern coasts of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov and the Kuban valley.

The Meots’ high level of material and spiritual culture and the influence of neighboring peoples on it are confirmed by the unique discoveries made during the excavation of kurgans near the village of Ulyap in Krasnogvardeysky District, which were first known as the Ulsk kurgans, but after a brilliant analysis by Professor A.M. Peskov in 1981-1982, were renamed the Ulyap kurgans.

The first iron appeared here in the second millennium BC. and led to major economic and social advances at the end of the 9th and the beginning of the 8th centuries BC. The economic structure was represented by cattle-breeding, agriculture, metallurgy and metalworking, weaving, and spinning. This period is known in history as the Protomeotic.

The 7th-6th centuries BC. saw the beginning of widespread use of iron in the Northwest Caucasus, which led to the rapid development of productive forces that transformed the entire material culture and social life. By this time, the Meotic culture was thriving on the right bank of the Kuban, on the left banks of its tributaries to the northern slopes of the Caucasian range, and along the eastern shore of Lake Meota (the Sea of Azov). The Meots lived in farming settlements, and along with farming, stock-breeding, fishing, metallurgy and metalworking, and crafts (pottery, weaving, jewelry-making, tanning, woodworking, etc.) were also well developed.

The 5th century BC. began with the rise of cities that became craft and trading centers in the lands of one of the Meotic tribes of Sinds. Intercourse with the Greek world, accelerated the process of formation of classes and states 7among the Sinds. By the end of the 5th century B.C., Sindika had been transformed into a real kingdom. Close political and economic ties were formed with the Bosporus state. Many scientists believe that the Spartacid dynasty that ruled the Bosporus for more than 150 years was Meotic (M.I. Artamonov, E.I. Krupnov) rather than Greek.

At the beginning of the Common Era, one of the coastal tribes, the Zikhs, appeared on the historical scene. Being in a more advantageous position than the steppe-dwelling Meats for a number of reasons, the Zikhs began to play an important role in the unification process. By the 6th century AD., the neighboring tribes had united around the Zikhs to form the Zikh Union. Eighth-century authors refer to Zikhia as a sizable country on the eastern shore of the Black Sea resulting from consolidation of the tribes into a single Adyghe people. Two other unions, namely, the Kasog in the Transkuban region and the Abazg in the southeast, formed along with the Zikh Union.

In the 6th century A.D., Byzantine influence was increasing in the Northwest Caucasus. By this time the coastal Adyghe had converted to Christianity and a Zikh diocese directly under the Byzantine patriarch had been formed. Contemporary references to the Adyghe as the Zikhs and Kasogs give reason to believe that the single Adyghe union had split into the western and eastern Adyghe (Kabardians).

In 944, after the defeat of the Khazar Khanate by the Kievan prince Svyatoslav, the city of Tamatarkha became part of Rus under the name of Tmutarakan. The territory of the Tmutarakan principality included the Eastern Crimea and the Taman Peninsula, and among the inhabitants were Slavs, Adyghe, Greeks, and Alans.

The Russian Lavrentev Chronicle first mentions the Adyghe under the name of Kasogs in the 10th century. Kasogs were included in the retinue of the Tmutarakan prince Mstislav, and took part in the 11th -century campaigns against Yaroslav the Wise. With the weakening of the Kievan state, the Russian princes lost Tmutarakan at the end of the 11th century. The Kipchaks (Polovtsy) took Tmutarakan from Rus, and the Slavic population of the Northwest Caucasus merged with the Adyghe.

From the second half of the 13th century to almost the end of the 15th century, the Genoese, who had their own colonies of Matrega, Kopa, and Mapa in Adyghe lands, had a decisive influence on the cultural and historical development of the Adyghe. The population consisted of Italians, Greeks, and Adyghe.

The celebrated Silk Route passed through the territory of historical Cherkessia (Circassia), as shown by archaeological finds from the Moshchevaya Balka burial ground (7th-9th centuries) on the Bolshaya Laba River, Psebai District, and the Belorechensk kurgans (13th-15th centuries).

In the 10th century, the Adyghe had already become a single nation. Anthropologically, the Adyghe belonged to the northwestern group of Pontic Europeans, and linguistically, to the Northwest Caucasian (Abkhazo-Adyghean) group of Caucasian languages.

The formation of the Adyghe people over the millennia took place in close contact with the tribes of Western Asia, Greeks, Cimmerians, Scythians, and Sarmatians. The main Adyghe settlements were located in the northwestern foothills and plains of the lower reaches of the Kuban and on the east coast of the Black Sea from the mouth of the Don to Abkhazia.

Adyghe society of that time can be described as early feudal, and farming was the leading economic sector. Cattle- and horse-breeding, fishing, and crafts were well developed. The finds at the Kolosovka (8th century) and Psekups (8th-9th centuries) burial grounds and the Belorechensk kurgans, among others, are outstanding examples of premedieval and medieval Adyghe culture.

The Mongol invasion changed the map of tribal settlements in the eastern and central areas of the Northern Caucasus. In 1238-1239, the Mongols captured all of the pre-Caucasian plains, and in the early 1240s, the state known as the Golden Horde had formed, whose southern borders extended to the Crimea and the foothills of the Caucasus range.

Under these conditions and political circumstances, some of the Adyghe (Kabardians) migrated east to the edge of the Central pre-Caucasian plain, which in turn led to the division of the common language into western (Adyghean) and eastern (Kabardian) dialects and later formed the basis of the modern Adyghean and Kabardian languages.

From about the 1240s onward, the word “Cherkess” appears in sources. The name Cherkess, which comes from the Turkic designation for the Adyghe, was adopted by other nations and became fixed in European and Eastern literature.

In the 17th century, the Adyghe who had separated from the Kabardians moved back west and settled in the area of the Upper Kuban. These were the so-called Besleneevtsy. At the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries, a second group joined them from Kabarda. As a result, the Adyghe were divided into three nations, the Adygheans, the Kabardians, and Circassians, although besides language, material and spiritual culture, and a common consciousness, the Adyghe shared a common territory.

In the 12th and 13th centuries, there was a thriving trade in Adyghe slaves on the slave markets of Middle Eastern countries, especially Egypt, where sultans acquired them as additions to their Mamluk guard.

The influx of slaves allowed one of the Adyghe, Al-Malik-az-Zakhir Barkuk al Cherkesi, to seize power in Egypt and found the Circassian dynasty of Mamluks, which ruled Egypt and Syria from 1382 to 1517. The Mamluks finally disappeared from the Middle Eastern political arena in 1811.

The Circassian Mamluks left a significant imprint on the history and culture of Egypt, Syria, and the entire Middle East. They repelled invasions of Crusaders, halted the onslaught of the conqueror Tamerlane, and greatly extended the boundaries of the Mamluk state.

During the period of Circassian rule, architecture progressed significantly; irrigation systems were built; and poets, musicians, philosophers, and historians enjoyed special patronage.

The decline of Christianity among the Adyghe began at the end of the 15th century after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the disappearance of the Byzantine Empire from the world political map.

The Caucasian War of the 19th century and the way the Russian Empire conducted it had a decisive impact on the strengthening and final establishment of Islam in the Northwest Caucasus. Starting at the end of the 16th century, the Sunni branch of Islam was introduced among the Adyghe through the efforts of the Crimean Tatar khans and Turkish missionaries. This was accompanied by military expansion by the Crimean khans.

In the 16th century Russians representing imperial authority reached agreement with Kabardan princes who welcomed traders and military support against rivals.  In 1561, Tsar Ivan the Terrible married Temryuk’s daughter, a Kabardian princess Goshenai  (baptized Maria).

The marriage of Maria Temryukovna to Tsar Ivan the Terrible and her conversion to Orthodoxy symbolize the cooperative relations that existed at that time. Russian expansion always entailed some degree of missionary purpose – encouragement of the spread of Russian Orthodoxy, but religion was a secondary factor in Russian expansion into the North Caucasus.

Kabarda, where the population was divided into clearly defined social classes, marked the beginning of a Russian technique of gaining predominance by co-opting the local aristocracy – the Kabardian princes, whose descendants became prominent among the Russian nobility.  This approach was less effective with ethnic groups that had a more egalitarian social structure, such as the Chechens and the Ingush, many of the other Circassian tribes, and the peoples of Dagestan.

By the 18th century, the Adyghe occupied the territory from the mouth of the Kuban along the Black Sea coast to the Psou River and from the northern slopes of the Caucasian mountains to Ossetia; and in the first half of the 19th century, they inhabited extensive areas of the Black Sea coast and the Northern Caucasus. As Russia advanced southward, this territory shrank to 180.000 sq. km by the 1830s.

According to data of the Russian officer Novitsky, the Adyghe population in 1830 was 1.082.000, and ethnic subdivisions of the Adyghe were preserved, including the Shapsugh, Abadzekh, Natukhay, Temirgoy, Bzhedugh, Hatukay, Besleney, Egerukay, Makhosh, Adamie, Mamkheg, and Kabardey.

By the 1860s, as a result of the Caucasian War and forced deportation to the Ottoman Empire, only 5% of the Adyghe remained in their historical homeland. Ethnographers define the modern-day Adyghe people as a dispersed nation. More than 3 million Adyghe live in more than 50 countries, including Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Israel, the United States, Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Germany.

After the end of the Caucasian War, the Northwest Caucasus was under military occupation until 1867, and the Adyghe population came under the jurisdiction of military authorities. On January 1, 1867, the military occupation finally ended and the Adyghe population became part of the general population of the newly formed Maykop, Ekaterinodar, and Batalpashinsk districts.

On March 21, 1888, Alexander III approved a new statute setting up the administrations of Kuban and Tersk regions and Chernomorskaya Province, which abolished civil institutions and established a narrow Cossack military governing caste without the participation of the mountain peoples.

In 1914-1917, the Adyghe took part in World War I in the Circassian regiment known as the “Wild Division.” The Civil War resulted in another sizable migration of Adyghe to Turkey and Middle Eastern countries.

The revival of the ancient Adyghe people as a nation did not begin until after the October Revolution, with the formation of the Circassian (Adyghean) Autonomous Region on July 21, 1922. In 1936, by order of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, the capital of Adyghea was moved from Krasnodar to Maykop.

On October 5, 1991, the Adyghean people achieved real statehood when the Republic of Adyghea was proclaimed. The legal document On State Sovereignty of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Adyghea defined the place and role of Adyghea in a renewed Russia.

Adyghea’s new status as an independent subject of the Russian Federation was legalized by the RSFSR Supreme Soviet’s approval of RSFSR Law N 1535-1 of July 3, 1991, On the Transformation of the Adyghean Autonomous Region into the Soviet Socialist Republic of Adyghea.

In December 1991, elections were held to elect deputies to the Supreme Soviet of the Republic of Adyghea, and the first parliament in Adyghea’s history was formed. Aslan Alievich Dzharimov, the Republic’s first president, was elected in January 1992. In March 1992, Adam Khuseinovich Tleuzh was elected the first chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Republic of Adyghea.

In five years, Adyghea acquired all the attributes of statehood, beginning with state symbols and ending with the adoption of the Constitution of the Republic of Adygea and the formation of state governing bodies. The Constitution of the Republic of Adyghea was approved by the Legislative Assembly (Khase) on March 10, 1995.

The Abkhaz:

The Abkhaz or Abkhazians (Abkhaz: Аҧсуа, Apswa) are a Caucasian ethnic group, mainly living in Abkhazia, a disputed region on the Black Sea coast. A large Abkhaz diaspora population resides in Turkey, the origins of which lie in the emigration from the Caucasus in the late 19th century known as muhajirism. Many Abkhaz also live in other parts of the former Soviet Union, particularly in Russia and Ukraine.

The Abkhaz language belongs to the Northwest Caucasian languages group. Classical sources speak of several tribes dwelling in the region, but their exact identity and location remains controversial. The Abasgoi and Apsilai of the Graeco-Roman authors are considered as the predecessors of modern-day Abkhaz.

The integration of various smaller ethnic subgroups into the modern-day Abkhaz people was basically completed by the late 10th century, but some of these groups were deprived of their homeland when the Russian conquest of northwestern Caucasus forced them to become muhajirun and emigrate to the Ottoman possessions.

Lower Paleolithic hunting-gathering encampments formed the first known settlements on the territory of modern-day Abkhazia. The earliest examples have been unearthed at the sites of Iashkhtva, Gumista, Kelasuri, and Ochamchire.

Upper Paleolithic culture settled chiefly the coastline. Mesolithic and Neolithic periods brought larger permanent settlements, and marked the beginning of farming, animal husbandry, and the production of ceramics.

The earliest artifacts of megalithic culture appeared in the early 3rd millennium BC and continued into the Bronze Age as the so-called dolmens of Abkhazia, typically consisting of four upright mass stones and a capstone, some of them weighting as much as 50 tonnes. A dolmen from the Eshera archaeological site is the best studied prehistoric monument of this type.

The Late Bronze Age saw the development of more advanced bronze implements, and continued into the Iron Age as a part of the Colchian culture (c. 1200-600 BCE), which covered most of what is now western Georgia and part of northeastern Anatolia.

The Ubykh:

The Ubykh are a group who spoke the Northwest Caucasian Ubykh language, until other local languages displaced it and its last speaker died in 1992.

The Ubykh used to inhabit an area in what is today Sochi, Krasnodar Krai, Russia. They may well have been inhabitants of the ancient state of Colchis.

The Ubykh were semi-nomadic horsemen, and their language contained a finely differentiated vocabulary related to horses and tack. Some Ubykh also practised favomancy and scapulomancy.

However, the Ubykh gained more prominence in modern times. By 1864, during the reign of Tsar Alexander II, the Russian conquest of the Northwestern Caucasus had been completed. The Adyghe and Abkhaz were decimated, and the Abaza were partially driven out of the Caucasus.

Faced with the threat of subjugation by the Russian army, the Ubykh, as well as other Muslim peoples of Caucasus, left their homeland en masse beginning on March 6, 1864. By May 21, the entire Ubykh nation had departed from the Caucasus. They eventually settled in a number of villages in western Turkey around the municipality of Manyas.

In order to avoid discrimination, the Ubykh elders encouraged their people to assimilate into Turkish culture. Having abandoned their traditional nomadic culture, they became a nation of farmers. The Ubykh language was rapidly displaced by Turkish and Circassian; the last native speaker of Ubykh, Tevfik Esenç, died in 1992.

Today, the Ubykh diaspora has been scattered about Turkey and – to a much lesser extent – Jordan. The Ubykh nation per se no longer exists, although those who are of Ubykh ancestry are proud to call themselves Ubykh, and a couple of villages are still found in Turkey where the vast majority of the population is Ubykh by descent.

Ubykh society was patrilineal; many Ubykh descendants today know five, six, or even seven generations of their agnatic ancestry. Nevertheless, as in other Northwest Caucasian cultures, women were especially venerated, and the Ubykh language retains a special second person pronoun prefix used exclusively with women (χa-).

The Maykop culture:

The Maykop culture (3700-2500 BCE), in the North Caucasus, was culturally speaking a sort of southern extension of the Yamna horizon. Although not generally considered part of the Pontic-Caspian steppe culture due to its geography, the North Caucasus had close links with the steppe, as attested by numerous ceramics, gold, copper and bronze weapons and jewelry in the contemporaneous cultures of Mikhaylovka, Sredny Stog and Kemi Oba. The link between the North Pontic and North Caucasus is older than the Maykop period. Its predecessor, the Svobodnoe culture (4400-3700 BCE), already had links to the Suvorovo-Novodanilovka and early Sredny Stog cultures, and the even older Nalchik settlement (5000-4500 BCE) displayed a similar culture as Khvalynsk on the Volga. This may be the period when R1b started interracting and blending with the R1a population of the steppes.

The Yamna and Maykop people both used kurgan burials, with their deads in a supine position with raised knees and oriented in a north-east/south-west axis. Graves were sparkled with red ochre on the floor, and sacrificed dometic animal buried alongside humans. They also had in common horse riding, wagons, a cattle- and sheep-based economy, the use of copper/bronze battle-axes (both hammer-axes and sleeved axes) and tanged daggers. In fact, the oldest wagons and bronze artefacts are found in the North Caucasus, and spread from there to the steppes.

Maykop was an advanced Bronze Age culture, actually one of the very first to develop metalworking, and therefore metal weapons. The world’s oldest sword was found at a late Maykop grave in Klady kurgan 31. Its style is reminiscent of the long Celtic swords, though less elaborated. Horse bones and depictions of horses already appear in early Maykop graves, suggesting that the Maykop culture might have been founded by steppe people or by people who had close link with them. However, the presence of cultural elements radically different from the steppe culture in some sites could mean that Maykop had a hybrid population. Without DNA testing it is impossible to say if these two populations were an Anatolian R1b group and a G2a Caucasian group, or whether R1a people had settled there two. The two or three etnicities might even have cohabited side by side in different settlements. Typical Caucasian Y-DNA lineages (such as G2a) do not follow the pattern of Indo-European migrations, so intermarriages must have been limited, or at least restricted to Indo-European men taking Caucasian wives rather than the other way round.

Maykop people are the ones credited for the introduction of primitive wheeled vehicles (wagons) from Mesopotamia to the steppes. This would revolutionise the way of life in the steppe, and would later lead to the development of (horse-drawn) war chariots around 2000 BCE. Cavalry and chariots played an vital role in the subsequent Indo-European migrations, allowing them to move quickly and defeat easily anybody they encountered. Combined with advanced bronze weapons and their sea-based culture, the western branch (R1b) of the Indo-Europeans from the Black Sea shores are excellent candidates for being the mysterious Sea Peoples, who raided the eastern shores of the Mediterranean during the second millennium BCE.

The rise of the IE-speaking Hittites in Central Anatolia happened a few centuries after the disappearance of the Maykop culture. A back migration from the North Caucasus to northern Anatolia is very likely in this age of expansion. What is certain is that the Hittites used chariots, invented in the Volga-Ural steppes. R1a being found a low frequencies in Armenia and northern Anatolia, it is not unreasonable to imagine that a hybrid group of R1a-R1b from the Volga-Ural region migrated to this region sometime between 2000 BCE and 1650 BCE. The Maykop and Yamna cultures were succeeded by the Srubna culture (1600-1200 BCE), possibly representing an advance of R1a1a people from the northern and eastern steppes towards the Black Sea shores.