1. The Georgians.—It is the opinion of Rosen that the central province of Kartulinia, of which Tiflis is the capital, is the original seat of the Georgian family; the chief reasons lying in the fact of that part of the area being the most important. Thus, the language is called Kartulinian; whilst the provinces round about Kartulinia are considered as additions or accessions to the Georgian domain, rather than as integral and original portions of it—a fact which makes the province in question a sort of nucleus. Lastly, the Persian and Russian names, Gurg-istan and Gr-usia, by which the country is most widely known, point to the valley of the Kur.
To all this I demur. The utmost that is proved thereby is the greater political prominence of the occupants of the more favoured parts of the country; as the middle course of the Kur really is.
Of the two sides of the watershed that separates the rivers of the Black Sea[39] from those of the Caspian[40], it is the western which has the best claim to be considered the original habitat of the Georgians. Here it is that the country is most mountainous, and the mountains most abrupt. Hence it is, too, that a population would have both the wish and power to migrate towards the plains rather than vice versâ.
More weighty still is the evidence derived from the dialects. The Kartulinian is spoken over more than half the whole of Georgia: whereas, for the parts not Kartulinian, we hear of the following dialects:—
- 1. The Suanic, on the head-waters of the small rivers between Mingrelia, and the southern parts of the Circassian area—the Ingur, the Okoumiskqual, &c. This is the most northern section of the Georgian family.
- 2, 3. The Mingrelian and the Imiritian.
- 4, 5. The Guriel and Akalzike in Turkish Georgia.
- 6. The Lazic.—This is the tongue of the most western dialects. The hills which form the northern boundary of the valley of the Tsorokh are the Lazic locality; and here the diversity has attained its maximum. Small as is the Lazic population, every valley has its separate variety of speech.
I believe, then, that in Central Caucasus the Kartulinian Georgians have been intrusive; and this is rendered probable by the character of the populations to the north and east of them. Between Georgia and Daghestan we have, in the pre-eminently inaccessible parts of the eastern half of Caucasus[41], two fresh families, different from each other, different from the Lesgians, and different from the Circassians.
With such reasons for believing the original direction of the Georgian area to have been westernly, we may continue the investigation. That they were the occupants of a considerable portion of the eastern half of the ancient Pontus, is probable from the historical importance of the Lazi in the time of Justinian, when a Lazic war disturbed the degenerate Romans of Constantinople. It is safe to carry them as far west as Trebizond. It is safe, too, to carry them farther. One of the commonest of the Georgian terminations is the syllable -pe or -bi, the sign of the plural number; a circumstance which gives the town of Sino-pe a Georgian look—Sinope near the promontory of Calli-ppi.
2. The Irôn.—To the north-west of Tiflis we have the towns of Duchet and Gori, one on the Kur itself, and one on a left-hand feeder of it. The mountains above are in the occupation of the Irôn or Osetes. In Russian Georgia they amount to about 28,000. The name Irôn is the one they give themselves; Oseti is what they are called by the Georgians. Their language contains so great a per-centage of Persian words or vice versâ, that it is safe to put them both in the same class. This has, accordingly, been done—and a great deal more which is neither safe nor sound has been done besides.