Russia Georgia Caucasus Ossetia Abkhazia : Ethnolinguistic Map : Empty Google Map : Ancient Peoples of Region : Jason and the Argonauts : Zemanta
What does your average Internet commentator know about the Caucasus? We think it is very little, but we leave you to answer that question as you read Internet commentary on the current situation between the Black and Caspian Seas. We hope to add a bit of knowledge below.
In addition, we have a map mystery. We wanted to look at Georgia on Google Maps today, only to discover that Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan are as good as blanked out. As written at Google Maps censoring the South Caucasus region?
"Take a look at this screenshot I took from Google Maps:
[see here for the screenshot]
Notice anything odd? The capital cities, or any cities for that matter, are not displayed for Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. I know they were previously there because I often consulted Google Maps while planning my trip to the region a few years ago. So why, in this time of conflict when people might want to take a look at the region, has Google stripped out all the identifying information for these three countries?"
We will be interested in the ultimate explanation from Google for this unusual development.
In any case, rather than taking sides in the conflict, as most people on the web are doing, without knowing anything about this region of the world, we found an ethnolinguistic map from Wikimedia Commons at Wikipedia which shows at a glance the distribution of numerous ethnic groups in this bottlenecked region of the world between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, and why peace in the Caucasus is such a difficult thing to achieve in this multicultural setting:
For those who might have an interest in the "speculative" far distant history of this region, which might have relevance to the issue of where peoples of this region belong in the political scope of things like national allegiances, take a look at our interpretation of the ancient dolmens found along the coast of Russia in the West Caucasus and running down to and including Abkhazia and ending at what we presume was the ancient border to the ancient peoples of Georgia.
The first map below shows the location of the dolmens:
The second map below shows our interpretation of the dolmens as a planisphere of the heavens, which we think were placed there in ancient megalithic days by astronomy as border landmarks for that region.
These dolmens could - very speculatively - have been placed by the perhaps more real than legendary group of Jason and the Argonauts, who, according to legend, and the fact that the Greeks called a part of this region Colchis, allegedly gave their name to the Ossetians:
"The Russians originally called the Ossetians Jas possibly related to their contact with Jazones.
In Argonautica (of Apollonius of Rhodes) Jason's companions land on a beach of Colchis called Circea. They saw tamarisk and willow trees having corpses tied to the tree tops wrapped in an ox's skin. Apollonius explains that even in his day, when a male died, they hung him from a tree outside the town. The women, in contrast, were buried. In particular among the Ossetians, these funereal practices were still widespread up until a few decades ago. In Late Antiquity, records become much more diffuse, and the Iazyges generally cease to be mentioned as a tribe. In the Middle Ages an Iranian people appeared in Eastern-Europe, the Jazones (named in Latin diplomas also from Philistei/Filistei from the Biblical nation). Jazones, an Ossetic people migrated in Hungaria, are first mentioned in Hungarian records in the year 1318, and their name, spelled in Greek Language means "jason's" (Ιασονες)."
In the late 14th century adopted the Georgian name of the Ossetians and their nation. In the Georgian language, Alania and the Alans are known as "Oseti" (ოსეთი) and "Osebi" (ოსები) respectively. From the Russian language the names Ossetia and Ossetians came to other languages.
The Ossetians themselves refer to their nation as irættæ (maybe related to Aeetes or Iran)."
Accordingly, there are historical reasons in this region for certain peoples tending to align with other peoples and not with others. Most commentary on the Internet makes this appear like a simple modern issue between Russia and Georgia, but it has far deeper roots than that, and can only be understood in a historical context.
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Please note also that we are also experimenting here for the first time with a fairly new add-on extension called Zemanta by which a blog posting can be "zemified", i.e. Zemanta in the course of our posting monitors our typed text every 300 typed characters and then makes suggestions as to possible links and graphics that could be added to the posting based on the text typed into the posting content. It is something like a real time research aid, although in this case we did not use any of the suggested graphics but rather found on our own. However, we did apply the labels as a test. We are not sure we will keep Zemanta, but we are going to give this add-on a fair trial. Also the labels for the posting are automatically suggested by Zemanta.
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/11/2008 11:58:00 AM
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