High up among the peaks of this great Caucasian range lives, and has lived for centuries, one of the most interesting and remarkable peoples of modern times—a people which is interesting and remarkable not only on account of the indomitable bravery with which it defended its mountain-home for two thousand years against all comers, but on account of its originality, its peculiar social and political organization and its innate intellectual capacity. I call it a "people" rather than a race, because it comprises representatives of many races, and yet belongs, as a whole, to none of them. It is a collection of miscellaneous elements. The Caucasian range may be regarded for all ethnological purposes as a great mountainous island in the sea of human history, and on that island now live together the surviving Robinson Crusoes of a score of shipwrecked states and nationalities, the fugitive mutineers of a hundred tribal Bountys. Army after army has gone to pieces in the course of the last four thousand years upon that Titanic reef; people after people has been driven up into its wild ravines by successive waves of migration from the south and east; band after band of deserters, fugitives and mutineers has sought shelter there from the storms, perils and hardships of war. Almost every nation in Europe has at one time or another crossed, passed by or dwelt near this great Caucasian range, and each has contributed in turn its quota to the heterogeneous population of the mountain-valleys. The Indo-Germanic tribes as they migrated westward from Central Asia left there a few wearied and dissatisfied stragglers; their number was increased by deserters from the Greek and Roman armies of Alexander the Great and Pompey; the Mongols under Tamerlane, as they marched through Daghestan, added a few more; the Arabs who overran the country in the eighth century established military colonies in the mountains, which gradually blended with the previous inhabitants; European crusaders, wandering back from the Holy Land, stopped there to rest, and never resumed their journey; and finally, the oppressed and persecuted of all the neighboring nations—Jews, Georgians, Armenians and Tatars—fled to these rugged, inaccessible mountains as to a city of refuge where they might live and worship their gods in peace. In course of time these innumerable fragments of perhaps a hundred different tribes and nationalities, united only by the bond of a common interest, blended into one people and became known to their lowland neighbors as Gortze, or "mountaineers." From a mere assemblage of stragglers, fugitives and vagabonds they developed in the course of four or five hundred years into a brave, hardy, self-reliant people, and as early as the eighth century they had established in the mountains of Daghestan a large number of so-called volnea obshesve, or "free societies," governed by elective franchise, without any distinction of birth or rank. After this time they were never conquered. Both the Turks and the Persians at different periods held the nominal sovereignty of the country, but, so far as the mountaineers were concerned, it was only nominal. Army after army was sent against them, only to return broken and defeated, until at last among the Persians it passed into a proverb, "If the shah becomes too proud, let him make war on the mountaineers of the Caucasus." In 1801 these hitherto unconquered highlanders came into conflict with the resistless power of Russia, and after a desperate struggle of fifty-eight years they were finally subdued and the Caucasus became a Russian province.
At the present time the mountaineers as a class, from the Circassians of the Black Sea coast to the Lesghians of the Caspian, may be roughly described as a fierce, hardy, liberty-loving people, whose component members have descended from ancestors of widely different origin, and are separable into tribes or clans of very different outward appearance, but nevertheless alike in all the characteristics which grow out of and depend upon topographical environment. They number altogether about a million and a half, and are settled in little isolated stone villages throughout the whole extent of the range from the Black Sea to the Caspian at heights varying from three to nine thousand feet. They maintain themselves chiefly by pasturing sheep upon the mountains and cultivating a little wheat, millet and Indian corn in the valleys; and before the Russian conquest they were in the habit of eking out this scanty subsistence from time to time by plundering raids into the rich neighboring lowlands of Kakhetia and Georgia. In religion they are nearly all Mohammedans, the Arabs having overrun the country and introduced the faith of Islam as early as the eighth century. In the more remote and inaccessible parts of the Eastern Caucasus there still remain a few isolated aouls ("villages") of idolaters; in Daghestan there are four or five thousand Jews, who, although they have lost their language and their national character, still cling to their religion; and among the high peaks of Toochetia is settled a tribe of Christians said to be the descendants of a band of mediæval crusaders. But these are exceptions: ninety-nine one-hundredths of the mountaineers are Mohammedans of the fiercest, most intolerant type.
The languages and dialects spoken by the different tribes of this heterogeneous population are more than thirty in number, two-thirds of them being in the eastern end of the range, where the ethnological diversity of the people is most marked. So circumscribed and clearly defined are the limits of many of these languages that in some parts of the Eastern Caucasus it is possible to ride through three or four widely-different linguistic areas in a single day. Languages spoken by only twelve or fifteen settlements are comparatively common; and in South-western Daghestan there is an isolated village of less than fifty houses—the aoul of Innookh—which has a dialect of its own not spoken or understood, so far as has yet been ascertained, by any other portion of the whole Caucasian population. None of these mountain-languages have ever been written, but the early introduction of the Arabic supplied to a great extent this deficiency. Almost every settlement has its mullah or kadi, whose religious or judicial duties make it necessary for him to know how to read and write the language of the Koran, and when called upon to do so he acts for his fellow-townsmen in the capacity of amanuensis or scribe. Since 1860 the eminent Russian philologist General Usler has invented alphabets and compiled grammars for six of the principal Caucasian languages, and the latter are now taught in all the government schools established under the auspices of the Russian mountain administration at Vladi Kavkaz, Timour Khan, Shoura and Groznoi.
In government the Caucasian highlanders acknowledged previous to the Russian conquest no general head, each separate tribe or community having developed for itself such system of polity as was most in accordance with the needs and temperament of its component members. These systems were of almost all conceivable kinds, from the absolute hereditary monarchies of the Arab khans to the free communities or simple republics of Southern Daghestan. In the former the ruler could take the life of a subject with impunity to gratify a mere caprice, while in the latter a subject who considered himself aggrieved by a decision of the ruler could appeal to the general assembly, which had power to annul the decree and even to change the chief magistrate. Since the Russian conquest the mountaineers have altered to some extent both their forms of government and their mode of life. Blood-revenge and plundering raids into the valley of Georgia have nearly ceased; tribal rulers in most parts of the mountains have given place to Russian ispravniks; and the rude and archaic systems of customary law which prevailed everywhere previous to 1860 are being slowly supplanted by the less summary but juster processes of European jurisprudence. Such, in rapid and general outline, are the past history and the present condition of the Caucasian mountaineers.
Of course, the life, customs and social organization of a people who originated in the peculiar way which I have described, and who have lived for centuries in almost complete isolation from all the rest of the world, must present many strange and archaic features. In the secluded valleys of the Eastern Caucasus the modern traveller may study a state of society which existed in England before the Norman Conquest, and see in full operation customs and legal observances which have been obsolete everywhere else in Europe for a thousand years. But it is to the literature of these people rather than to their life or their customs that I wish now particularly to call attention. I have said that they are remarkable for originality and innate intellectual capacity, and I shall endeavor to make good my assertion by presenting some specimens of their songs, fables, riddles, proverbs, burlesques and popular tales. Living as they do on the boundary-line between Europe and Asia, made up as they are of many diverse races, Aryan, Turanian and Semitic, they inherit all the traditionary lore of two continents, and hand down from generation to generation the fanciful tales of the East mingled with the humorous stories, the witty anecdotes and the practical proverbs of the West. You may hear to-day in almost any Caucasian aoul didactic fables from the Sanscrit of the Hitopadesa, anecdotes from the Gulistan of the Persian poet Saadi, old jokes from the Grecian jest-book of Hierocles, and humorous exaggerations which you would feel certain must have originated west of the Mississippi River. I heard one night in a lonely mountain-village in the Eastern Caucasus from the lips of a Daghestan mountaineer a humorous story which had been told me less than a year before by a student of the Western Reserve College at Hudson, Ohio, and which I had supposed to be an invention of the mirth-loving sophomores of that institution.
But the literature which the Caucasian mountaineers have inherited, and which they share with all the Semitic and Indo-European races, is not so deserving of notice as the literature which they have themselves invented—the stories, songs, anecdotes and burlesques which bear the peculiar impress of their own character. I shall endeavor, therefore, in giving specimens of Caucasian folk-lore, to confine myself to stories, songs and proverbs which are peculiar to the mountaineers themselves, or which have been worked over and modified to accord with Caucasian tastes and standards. It will be seen that I use the word "literature" in the widest possible sense, to include not only what is commonly called folk-lore, but also oaths, greetings, speeches, prayers and all other forms of mental expression which in anyway illustrate character.
The translations which I shall give have all been made from the original tongues through the Russian. Although I visited the Caucasus in 1870, and rode hundreds of miles on horseback through its wild gloomy ravines, familiarizing myself with the life and customs of its people, I did not acquire any of the mountain-languages so that I could translate from them directly; neither did I personally collect the proverbs, stories and songs which I here present. I am indebted for most of them to General Usler, to Prince Djordjadze—with whom I crossed Daghestan—and to the Russian mountain administration at Tiflis. All that I have done is to translate them from the Russian, and set them in order, with such comments and explanatory notes as they seem to require and as my Caucasian experience enables me to furnish.
I will begin with Caucasian greetings and curses. The etiquette of salutation in the Caucasus is extremely elaborate and ceremonious. It does not by any means satisfy all the requirements of perfect courtesy to ask a mountaineer how he is, or how his health is, or how he does. You must inquire minutely into the details of his domestic economy, manifest the liveliest interest in the growth of his crops and the welfare of his sheep, and even express a cordial hope that his house is in a good state of repair and his horses and cattle properly protected from any possible inclemency of weather. Furthermore, you must always adapt your greeting to time, place and circumstances, and be prepared to improvise a new, graceful and appropriate salutation to meet any extraordinary exigence. In the morning a mountaineer greets another with "May your morning be bright!" to which the prompt rejoinder is, "And may a sunny day never pass you by!" A guest he welcomes with "May your coming bring joy!" and the guest replies, "May a blessing rest on your house!" To one about to travel the appropriate greeting is, "May God make straight your road!" to one returning from a journey, "May health and strength come back with rest!" to a newly-married couple, "May you have sons like the father and daughters like the mother!" and to one who has lost a friend, "May God give you what he did not live to enjoy!" Among other salutations in frequent use are, "May God make you glad!" "May your sheep be multiplied!" "May you blossom like a garden!" "May your hearth-fire never be put out!" and "May God give you the good that you expect not!"
The curses of the Caucasus are as bitter and vindictive as its greetings are courteous and kind-hearted. I have often heard it said by the Persians and Tatars who live along the Lower Volga that there is no language to swear in like the Russian; and I must admit that they illustrated and proved their assertion when occasion offered in the most fluent and incontrovertible manner; but I am convinced, after having heard the curses of experts in all parts of the East, that for variety, ingenuity and force the profanity of the Caucasian mountaineers is unsurpassed. They are by no means satisfied with damning their adversary's soul after the vulgar manner of the Anglo-Saxon, but invoke the direst calamities upon his body also; as, for example, "May the flesh be stripped from your face!" "May your heart take fire!" "May eagles drink your eyes!" "May your name be written on a stone!" (i.e. a tombstone); "May the shadow of an owl fall on your house!" (this, owing probably to the rarity of its occurrence, is regarded as a fatal omen); "May your hearth-fire be put out!" "May you be struck with a hot bullet!" "May your mother's milk come with shame!" "May you be laid on a ladder!" (alluding to the Caucasian custom of using a ladder as a bier); "May a black day come upon your house!" "May the earth swallow you!" "May you stand before God with a blackened face!" "Break through into hell!" (i.e. through the bridge of Al Sirat); "May you be drowned in blood!" Besides these curses, all of which are uttered in anger, the mountaineers have a number of milder imprecatory expressions which they use merely to give additional force or emphasis to a statement. A man, for instance, will exclaim to another, "Oh, may your mother die! what a superb horse you have there!" or, "May I eat all your diseases if I didn't pay twenty-five abaz for that kinjal ("dagger") in Tiflis!" The curious expression, "May your mother die!" however malevolent it may sound to Occidental ears, has in the Caucasus no offensive significance. It is a mere rhetorical exclamation-point to express astonishment or to fortify a dubious statement. The graphic curse, "May I eat all your diseases!" is precisely analogous to the American boy's "I hope to die." Generally speaking, the mountaineers use angry imprecations and personal abuse of all kinds sparingly. Instead of standing and cursing one another like enraged Billingsgate fish-women, they promptly cut the Gordian knot of their misunderstanding with their long, double-edged daggers, and presently one of them is carried away on a ladder. When, as a Caucasian proverb asserts, "It is only a step from the bad word to the kinjal," even an angry man is apt to think twice before he curses once.
It is difficult to select from the proverbs of the Caucasian mountaineers, numerous as they are, any which are certainly and peculiarly their own. They inherit the proverbial philosophy of all the Aryan and Semitic races, and for the most part merely repeat with slight variations the well-worn saws of the English, the Germans, the Russians, the Arabs and the French. I will give, however, a few specimens which I have not been able to find in modern collections, and which are probably of native invention. It will be noticed that they are all more remarkable for force and for a peculiar grim, sardonic humor than for delicacy of wit or grace of expression. Instead of neatly running a subject through with the keen flashing rapier of a witty analogy, as a Spaniard would do, the Caucasian mountaineer roughly knocks it down with the first proverbial club which comes to hand; and the knottier and more crooked the weapon the better pleased he seems to be with the result. Whether the work in hand be the smiting of a rock or the crushing of a butterfly, he swings high overhead the Hammer of Thor. Compare, for example, the French and the Caucasian methods of expressing the fact that the consequences of bad advice fall on the advised and not on the adviser. The Frenchman is satisfied to simply state the obvious truism that advisers are not payers, but the mountaineer, with forcible and graphic imagery, declares that "He who instructs how to jump does not tear his mouth, but he who jumps breaks his legs." Again: the German has in his proverbial storehouse no more vivid illustration of the wilfulness of luck than the saying that "A lucky man's hens lay eggs with double yolks;" but this is altogether too common and natural a phenomenon to satisfy the mountaineer's conception of the power of luck; so he coolly knocks the subject flat with the audacious hyperbole, "A lucky man's horse and mare both have colts." Fortune and misfortune present themselves to the German mind as two buckets in a well; but to the Caucasian mountaineer "Fortune is like a cock's tail on a windy day" (i.e., first on one side and then on the other). The Danes assert guardedly that "He loses least in a quarrel who controls his tongue;" but the mountaineer cries out boldly and emphatically, "Hold your tongue and you will save your head;" and in order that the warning may not be forgotten, he inserts it as a sort of proverbial chorus at the end of every paragraph in his oldest code of written law. It is not often that a proverb rises to such dignity and importance as to become part of the legal literature of a country; and the fact that this proverb should have been chosen from a thousand others, and repeated twenty or thirty times in a brief code of criminal law, is very significant of the character of the people.